Everett Archives: Industrial League Baseball
Header image: Lowell baseball team // Courtesy of Gail Chism
In the great industrial city of Everett, before there was electric lights, or movies, or phonographs, or radio, there was baseball. At the turn of the twentieth century, ball games were a great source of public entertainment. So great that stellar baseball players were sometimes called on by the newspaper editors to become mayor!
But entertainment was sometimes only a byproduct of heated baseball games. These intense competitions fostered bitter rivalries among local teams, and bragging rights were at stake.
Nowhere was this more true than the city’s Industrial League. The Industrial League was comprised of a group of company-sponsored teams. Everett had teams from the egg packing plant, Sumner Ironworks, and assorted mills. The Great Northern Railway had a team and so did Everett Pulp and Paper. Even the fire department had nine ballplayers among their ranks.
Let’s take a closer look at elements of Everett’s Industrial League to bring into focus this forgotten slice of local athletic history.
Teams traveled by steamboat // Courtesy of MOHAI
Egg Packers
Few people today know about the egg packing plant in old Riverside. The building was destroyed by Interstate 5. But a hundred years ago, egg packers packaged up poultry goods from the Snohomish River Valley and distributed them throughout the city via delivery truck.
It takes considerable brawn to throw cartons of eggs all day, so presumably, these unionized egg plant workers had some muscles to apply to their hitting and fielding on the diamond.
The Fire Department Team
Early Everett was ringed in mills. A lot of mills equals a lot of dried wood equals a lot of mill fires. The Everett fire department was kept hopping by regular mill blazes. When they weren’t chasing down waterfront infernos, firefighters hit the ball fields. The legendary third baseman Razz Canonica (nominated as the Everett Herald’s 1954 Man of the Year in Sports) played for the firefighters, even though he started his baseball career in the Lowell Nine.
Sumner Ironworks
The original Sumner Ironworks, like the egg plant, was also in Riverside, near the present-day location of the Highway 2 trestle (Sumner later moved to Lowell). The ironworkers seem to have been a rough lot, as you might expect from men accustomed to intense manual labor under grueling conditions.
Three games a day, travel by steamboat
The pace of local baseball was pretty intense, especially when you consider that these laborers played baseball in their spare time, when they weren’t working shifts at the lumber mill or iron plant. Sometimes Everett teams would play triple headers in nearby towns, and most of them travelled by steamboat -- either up the Snohomish River or across Possession Sound to Anacortes, Maltby, or Stanwood.
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