Let’s remember when the first bicycle showed up in Washington territory, on this day in 1879 (November 14)
Published in
1 min readNov 14, 2019
The trajectory that took Seattle to being the number one bike-friendly city in America began exactly 140 years ago.
Greg Lange of HistoryLink said:
On November 14, 1879, the first bicycle ever seen in Washington Territory arrives in Seattle aboard a steamer from San Francisco via Portland.
Seattle merchant William H. Pumphrey displayed the boy’s size two-wheeler in front of his store at 617 Front Street (later 1st Avenue). On November 18, 1879, Jules Lipsky bought the bicycle for his son.
The Weekly Intelligencer predicted, “Another season will find many bicycles here in active use.” The newspaper also noted that William H. Pumphrey & Co. featured “a stock of books not equaled elsewhere in the territory.”
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