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An extremely rare promotional map of southern Puget Sound, issued during the post-statehood boom by a Tacoma mortgage firm and compiled by Henry G. Plummer, one of the more active regional surveyors of the 1890s.
The map spans from Hood Canal and Kitsap County eastward across Admiralty Inlet to King County, and south through Mason, Pierce, and Thurston counties, covering the economic and infrastructural heart of the so-called “City of Destiny” era.
The map integrates data from the federal Public Land Survey, showing every township and section with precision. Dozens of private landowners are named, particularly in settled areas. Tacoma is rendered in a dense street grid extending south toward South Tacoma and Fern Hill. Salt and fresh water features are overprinted in blue, sharply delineating Commencement Bay, Hood Canal, and Poverty Bay. County boundaries are coded in alternating yellow-green and green bands.
Rail infrastructure is prominently shown, including the Northern Pacific line from Tenino to Tacoma and a companion Union Pacific alignment paralleling the Nisqually. Logging spurs and branch lines reach into the interior. Small towns, post offices, steamboat landings, and county roads are also included, giving the map strong practical utility for surveyors, investors, and land agents.
Manuscript additions
This example bears contemporary manuscript notations in pencil, red crayon, and ink. North of Tacoma, on the east shore of Poverty Bay, a small town site is drawn in grid form and labeled “Buenna,” a short-lived settlement platted in the early 1890s, now part of Federal Way. A red line marked “Route indicated by red” extends east from Buenna toward Kent (incorporated in 1890), and a pen-and-ink railroad spur is drawn to connect the two.
Issued for field use by a mortgage company, most impressions would have been annotated, heavily handled, and eventually discarded. The present example, with contemporary manuscript additions, is an important surviving document of real estate speculation and infrastructural ambition in the South Puget Sound corridor.
Buenna (Federal Way), Washington
The roots of Buenna, Washington, trace back to the 1850s, when U.S. Army engineers laid out a wagon-route to link Fort Steilacoom with the new post at Fort Bellingham. Much of the line simply formalized Native trails, including one that crossed the plateau south of present-day Seattle. Completed to Seattle by 1860 and known thereafter as Military Road, the track opened a corridor for homesteaders. Settlement on the high bench above Poverty Bay began in 1871, when Sam Stone established a claim at what locals soon called Stone’s Landing (today’s Redondo). Within a decade, pioneers Jacob Reith near Star Lake, Arthur Steele at Steel Lake, and others created a loose constellation of stump-farms, orchards, and split-log byways.
Residents petitioned for a post office in 1878. The Milton Post Office opened on 3 December, 1878, with Walter D. Cotton as postmaster, its site eighteen road-miles south of Seattle and a short walk east of Stone’s Landing. Aside from two brief closures (1879–88), Milton served as the district’s focal point during a period of modest prosperity: two small steam-powered sawmills turned the dense fir forest into lumber, orchards yielded market fruit, a Congregational church held services, and a daily steamer to Tacoma connected the hamlet’s 150 residents with Puget Sound commerce.
Commercial life, however, gravitated steadily toward the beach wharves on Poverty Bay. On 19 September 1890 the post office moved 1¼ miles southwest, adopted the new name Buenna, and appointed Joseph P. Bucey postmaster. The choice acknowledged the district’s Spanish-flavored toponymy (“Poverty Bay” itself dates from the 1850s) and aligned postal services with the real center of trade: the pier where cordwood, shingles, and farm produce met the Mosquito Fleet steamers. Buenna thus supplanted inland Milton as the civic label for a dispersed but growing shoreline population.
When Bucey’s post office was redesignated Stones on 12 February 1899, the name honored Sam Stone’s pioneering claim and acknowledged common usage among long-time residents. Only five years later, on 8 October 1904, the title shifted once more to Redondo, mirroring the beach’s popular resort identity and completing the evolution from stump settlement to seaside enclave. Redondo persisted as both postal designation and pleasure-ground, its tidal flats and boardwalk attracting summer visitors from Seattle well into the automobile age.
Rarity
The map is rare.
OCLC records five institutional holdings, at Yale, Harvard, the Seattle Public Library, the University of Washington, and the Washington State Library.
The map is not listed in Phillips, and no examples appear in recent market records.
