100 years ago in Spokane: Hillyard teens deface rival meat market
![Two Hillyard 17-year-olds were arrested for defacing the Carstens Meat Market with signs bearing the slogans “Scab Meat,” “Scab Market” and “Unfair to Union Labor,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle on Aug. 27, 1919. (Spokesman-Review archives)](https://thumb.spokesman.com/KD7c3Ri_vKyaYn6WBbTK8B07j4M=/1200x800/smart/media.spokesman.com/photos/2019/08/26/Kershner1919-08-27a.jpg)
Two Hillyard 17-year-olds were arrested after they were accused of defacing Carstens Meat Market with signs bearing the slogans “Scab Meat,” “Scab Market” and “Unfair to Union Labor.”
The Carstens shop had recently settled a strike with its butchers and resumed service. The city was in the midst of a larger butchers’ strike and a larger controversy over soaring postwar meat prices.
One of the boys was employed at a rival shop, the O.K. Market, a union shop. He and the other boy were apparently upset at the Carstens settlement.
Posters and painted slogans were found several days earlier and it took Carstens workers several hours to “clean off the defacements.” After a second round of vandalism, Carstens notified the sheriff’s department.
A deputy waiting the next night caught the boys in the act. He arrested them after a footrace “over half of Hillyard.”
From the fire beat: Two million feet of white pine lumber was destroyed in a lumberyard fire at Tiger, Washington, in Pend Oreille County.
The fire, of unknown cause, also destroyed the adjacent Transit Milling and Box Co.
Most of the lumber belonged to the Diamond Match Co. and the McGoldrick Lumber Co., and was awaiting shipment.
The fire started in the box company plant in the wee hours of the morning and spread into the lumberyard.