Eimprovement, Llc history

According to A Northwest Rail Pictorial by Warren W. Wing, the line started in 1873 as the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad.

Henry Villard launched the Oregon Improvement Company in October 1880 as part of his grand scheme to dominate the development of the Pacific Northwest.

By February 1881 the Oregon Improvement Company had acquired the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company, including the Newcastle Mine east of Lake Washington, at a cost of one million dollars.

John Howard’s enthusiasm for the Franklin coal project was dampened, however, when Villard’s grand scheme collapsed at the end 1883 and the Oregon Improvement Company went through the agonies of receivership and reorganization.

Out of the turmoil of reorganization, Elijah Smith emerged in April 1884 as president of the Oregon Improvement Company.

The first cargo of coal from Franklin reached San Francisco in early August 1885.

Successful in their demands to oust the Chinese and gain a pay increase for the workers at Franklin, and bolstered by the economics of a seller’s market in the coal industry, the Knights had urged a miners’ strike against the Oregon Improvement Company in February 1886.

Visitors to the newly built town in the summer of 1888 commented on the general air of progress and enthusiasm that prevailed among the miners, managers, workers, and their families.

Management at Franklin underwent a change in early 1889 when William Watkins resigned as mine superintendent, replaced by Hobart W. McNeill.

Consequently, local provisional governments prevailed in the newly formed towns until the passage of the Organic Act on May 2, 1890.

A return to the usual mining techniques in 1893 increased production at the Franklin Mine, but prices dropped due to the increasingly depressed general economy that followed the financial crash that year.

Another fire occurred on the morning of October 14, 1895, in the main slope of the Franklin Mine, in which four men lost their lives.

The fate of the company was sealed when it was sold to the Pacific Coast Company in 1896.

The Franklin Mine “top works” as photographed by Asahel Curtis in 1902. (Courtesy of Green River Community College.)

National Lumber Manufacturers Association begins its annual convention at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition on July 12, 1909.

From this disorderly beginning Oklahoma City became the state capital in 1910 and a metropolis of one-half million people by the turn of the twenty-first century.

Dan W. Peery, "The First Two Years," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 7 (September 1929).

Our businesses have thrived through the Great Depression, two World Wars and the major divestment of assets following the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.

Gig Harbor in Pierce County is incorporated as a fourth-class town on July 12, 1946.

Berlin B. Chapman, "Oklahoma City, From Public Land to Private Property," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 37 (Summer and Autumn 1959, Winter 1959–60).

6th ed.Boston, MA: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1999.

03:08 By 2000, Six Sigma was an industry with university programs,