ago on Pacific Avenue and Twelfth Street; but there is a new and elegant building going up on Pacific Avenue and Seventh Street better suited to the tastes and necessities of this august body. It is six stories in height, built of stone, with carvings and niches for statuary, and surmounted by a clock-tower one hundred and ninety-five feet above the ground. The interior is designed to correspond with the outside, and the "chamber" alone will seat, with its galleries, one thousand persons.
Tacoma has a wholesale as well as an active retail trade, nearly all lines of goods being represented. I am told that a conservative estimate of its wholesale business in 1889 would be from eight million to ten million dollars aside from those productions sold wholesale already mentioned, and this trade has but very recently been attempted.
Groceries, always an important branch of trade, are sold wholesale by a number of houses, three of which are confined exclusively to this business. The largest of these is the Tacoma Grocery Company, organized near the close of 1888, Charles E. Hale, president, which sold goods to the amount of one million dollars the first year. /
Paints, oils, and glass sell enormously in Tacoma, besides which hardware and farming implements is another good jobbing trade in a new country, and Tacoma has several houses which sell from seventy-five thousand dollars' to two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods annually. Farm-produce is also jobbed at the rate of from seventy-five thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty* thousand dollars yearly. Dairy products, canned goods, dried fruit, grain, and flour, each constitute a wholesale business for several firms. One house deals exclusively in tea, coffee, and spices, with sales amounting to fifty thousand dollars per annum; and besides, some of the retail firms do a business of ten thousand dollars a year in special lines of goods.
The Tacoma Mill Company sells two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of general merchandise every year, at jobbing rates; the Skagit River Railway and Logging Company, a Tacoma corporation, as much; and the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company, three hundred thousand dollars annually.
One jobbing house in Tacoma sells one million dollars' worth of dry-goods and clothing every year, and carries a stock worth
