On the power pole at the corner one reads, "This ferry runs all night to the Virginia Bar." Signs attached to boxes on the bar side of the mud read: "Sure Cure for Rheumatism: Mud Baths" and "Take the Ferry for the Virginia Bar, a paradise for Hunters, Herdman and McNamara."

The Virginia Inn cannot be very old in this view. While the inn's present owners, Patrice Demombynes and Jim Fotherlingham, were researching the history of the Livingston-Baker Building for their own 20th anniversary on this corner, they discovered that permission to build was given in 1901. This exhibition was likely staged sometime between 1903 and 1906, when the nearly new ridge on the east side of First Avenue north of Pike Street left by its 1899 regrade was washed away during the Second Avenue Regrade.

Herdman and McNamara were adding to a pioneer tradition of covering our unpaved streets with muddled hyperboles. On his Underground Seattle Tour, historian-showman Bill Speidel routinely described the death by street mud of one poor local who left only his hat wallowing on the surface of Jackson Street.

Speidel's story may be a variation on a tale dated to 1871, when pedestrians noted a hat in the muddy middle of the street. As J. Willis Sayer describes it in "This City Seattle," "Many stopped to look at the hat, but no one cared to recover the body supposed to be underneath it. So they started a checkup of the town to see who was missing."

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.