Seattle–Tacoma Box Company is a pioneering Seattle company established in 1889 by Jacob Nist and his sons as "Queen City Box Manufacturing Company." For over a century, the Nist family has continuously owned, managed, and operated the company, producing wooden crates, boxes, containers, and other wood products. Renamed "Seattle Box Company" in 1905, the business purchased a second manufacturing facility in Tacoma in 1922.
The two enterprises merged efforts in 1975 as "Seattle–Tacoma Box Company," opening a new plant in Kent, Washington. Governor Booth Gardner honored the Nist family and the company on its centennial in 1989, proclaiming the pride of the citizens of Washington for the company's "contributions to the economy of the state". In addition to wooden boxes and crates, today the company produces packaging supplies, bags, strapping, pallets, fuel pellets, portable moving and storage vaults, and seafood containers.
Queen City Box Manufacturing, 1889 to 1905
Jacob Nist, a farmer and grocer from Philadelphia, migrated to Seattle with his wife and seven children by 1880 and initially took up farming. He and his sons soon found work in the lumber mills. Nist worked for three years as a turner at the Stetson-Post Mill Company in Seattle, and his sons found employment as carpenters and mill engineers. By 1888, Nist and his sons Michael, Jacob J., George, and Aloys were all working at the Seattle Lumber and Commercial Company, which was operating 20 hours per day and had added a new box factory. That mill was destroyed on June 6, 1889, in the Great Seattle Fire, along with every other mill and wharf between Union and Jackson streets, as well as most of downtown Seattle.
To continue providing for the family after the fire, Nist and sons established the Queen City Box Manufacturing company and began production in October 1889. The original Queen City Manufacturing facility was next to the Nist family home on the shore of Lake Union. The company started slowly, and according to the Seattle City Directory three of Nist's sons, Michael, Jacob J., and John were also employed in 1890 by Skookum Manufacturing Company, another local sawmill. The company made millwork, sashes, and door frames. The Nists incorporated the company two years into production, in November 1891, with $10,000 capital, 100 shares at $100 each. The company objectives were to "manufacture, buy, sell and deal in all kinds of lumber, sashes, doors, window blinds, molding, stairs, stair rails and banisters, and all kinds of woodwork and finishing material−to operate sawmills, sash and door factories, shingle mills, box factories, and to build houses, deal in timber and own land."
Seattle experienced rapid growth in the 1890s, as did the new company, despite the temporary setback caused by the economic panic of 1893, which hit the Northwest hard. The Klondike Gold Rush began in 1897, and according to journalist J. Kingston Pierce, "Elliott Bay became the frenzied embarkation point for tens of thousands of miners shipping north." The miners provided additional business for Seattle companies that, in turn, required boxes and crates for their products. In 1903, Queen City Manufacturing Company even acquired a mine formerly owned by the Horseshoe Mining Company in Whatcom County, Washington.
Seattle Box Company, 1905 to 1920 Michael J. Nist became company president in 1905, but years before that he had become the major decision-maker of the business. Company founder Jacob Nist died in 1907, after almost six months' illness. By that time, the company had been renamed Seattle Box Company, reflecting the chief products of the company: crates, boxes, and shooks. (A shook is a set of wooden staves and headers, for assembling a barrel or cask.) The company was constructing a larger plant on the tidal flats of Elliott Bay in South Seattle. The building permit allowed three structures: a factory building, a dry kiln, and boiler room. A photograph by Seattle Times photographers Ira Webster and Nelson Stevens, circa 1905, shows the company surrounded by water, the only building in the area, accessible via a railroad trestle, a causeway built across the bay, and by a 30-foot motor launch kept under the building.
Two fires during this period, in 1908 and 1920, destroyed Seattle Box Company's mill building, machinery, and stock. The company used insurance reimbursements to re-build each time, and by 1916, assets had more than tripled, from the original $10,000 investment to over $30,000. Seattle Box Company continued production through World War I, running three shifts per day. Michael Nist stepped down as company president in 1920, selling his company shares to his sons Ferdinand and Joseph. He continued writing company checks through 1930 and died in 1932.
Seattle Box Company and Tacoma Box Company, 1920 to 1970 In 1920, Ferdinand J. Nist ("F.J.") became the third president of the company. He was a graduate of Seattle College and had learned the family business when he trained "as an ordinary workman" at the company.
Seattle plant expansion and Tacoma plant purchase in the 1920s In 1922, the manufacturing plant in Seattle was increased in size to a three-story cutting and assembling facility. The new plant occupied an entire city block, and the company's motto was, "A good wood box for the purpose intended at a fair price." The company purchased Calef Box Company in Tacoma in 1922. Joseph Nist undertook the management of it as Tacoma Box Company while planning a new facility. Before the plant was completed, however, Joe Nist died in a drowning accident during a family picnic in 1926, at age 37. Tacoma Box Company moved into new facilities in 1928, under the management of Leo Nist.
In this decade Seattle Box began modernizing, replacing two horse-drawn delivery carts with its first truck, a chain-driven Pierce-Arrow. By the end of the decade, the truck fleet also included a Ford and three Kenworth trucks built in nearby Kirkland, Washington. Since horses were no longer needed for delivery, the old stables under the plant were converted to a dry kiln, which allowed the inventory to include a larger variety of dry lumber stock, and ended the need for a lengthy storage period to air-dry the company's large inventory, of lumber. Other equipment modernization in the twenties included a new Stetson-Ross planer, two Mershon resaw machines, a new lumber carrier, and a new two-color modern design printer for boxes and crates.
During the twenties, the Nists also made a strategic decision to serve customers who had to order boxes in small lots, identifying a niche market. (Larger companies usually specialized in specific types of boxes, and required large orders to keep costs down.) The business that began in 1889, with four employees, had over a hundred people on the payroll by 1924, and had an extensive business in California and Hawaii. By 1927, Northwest Daily Produce News reported Seattle Box had orders from the West Indies for butter boxes made of odorless spruce, as well as another large order from a local creamery to box premium Edam cheese.
In 1928, Seattle Box Company bought a steam whistle from a Yukon River boat to mark starting and stopping times seven times daily—at five and six and seven a.m., at noon, one, four, and five o'clock. This "particularly throaty" steam whistle could be heard across a 12-mile (19 km) radius from the plant in downtown Seattle until it was finally retired in 1961, the last steam whistle in Seattle.
Great Depression and labor unrest in the 1930s From the beginnings of the family business, the Nists owned their business property and equipment outright. The company survived the Great Depression partly because they had avoided debt, partly because they did cost studies and priced products carefully and accurately, and partly because they designed containers for individual customers rather than specializing in a limited product line.
The company dealt with recurring challenges during this decade: collections were slow and prices were reduced to maintain business; the National Recovery Administration controlled both prices and profits under the code of fair competition for lumber and timber products; there were three small fires at the Seattle plant in the thirties; and labor unrest resulted in unionizing the workforce, with a 6-week strike in 1935 as well as a week-long walkout in 1937. In spite of his previous "hands off" policy toward union organizing, Ferdinand Nist became the lead negotiator for industry in the Pacific Northwest, settling with the Sawmill and Lumber Workers of the American Federation of Labor.
Rotting timbers in an aging foundation caused a potentially serious collapse of the Seattle plant in 1935. It completely buried one man in sawdust and endangered others who were partially buried. Fortunately, all the buried men were rescued without serious injuries, and the plant was almost immediately re-built on new foundation timbers. Repairs will commence at once.
Eugene M. Nist (Gene) began managing the Tacoma plant in 1938. With seven employees, and only the plant supervisor and himself on the regular payroll, Gene took on the role of manager, but also "bookkeeper, buyer, labor negotiator, and troubleshooter". He scrounged for orders, eventually producing furniture frames for upholstered sofas and box springs. Even with the challenges of the 1930s, Seattle Box Company kept paying dividends on its stock during the decade. In 1938, company president Ferdinand Nist explained in a radio interview that the family company "used 12 million feet of spruce and hemlock per year, all produced within of Seattle."
World War II effort of the 1940s During World War I, the company had heavy demand for boxes and crates, so early in the 1940s, Seattle Box began gearing up production, anticipating an increased need for the war effort. The company provided two and a half million boxes during World War II, for transportation of munitions, food, and supplies. The Northwest Veteran saluted the company for "the monumental part this company played in the prosecution of the nation's war program in World War II," citing the quality and reliability of its products.
Even though both plants were busy during the war, the company did not prosper in the forties due to shortages of lumber and labor as the country's workforce went to war. Minutes of the 1946 stockholders' meeting show the company's lumber inventory had been reduced, from over 3 million board feet in 1942, to just over a million in 1946. After the war, there was pent-up demand not only for boxes and crates but also for furniture that the Tacoma plant had been producing. The company expanded to produce box springs and began an effort to improve the handling of lumber to be kiln-dried. Both plants also continued to replace aging steam engines and boilers with electrical mill machinery. But there were no dividends distributed to stockholders for 1946. The trends of the decade were higher wages, shortages of materials, higher prices, and heavy competition, especially from local non-unionized factories.
Changing times in the 1950s Company profits remained low in the early 1950s. In 1951, Seattle Box reported a loss for only the second time in sixty-two years of operation. A labor strike in 1950 and a 1954 two-month strike affected profits by raising the basic wage to $1.905 per hour.
Seattle Box and Tacoma Box sought new products and more efficient ways to produce them. Wooden boxes continued to be the main product, but paper and corrugated cardboard boxes were beginning to affect demand. The Tacoma plant set up a round conveyor system, which was then also implemented in the Seattle plant. The company adopted a new system for coloring boxes in 1957, and in 1958, began using clamp gluing and bulk shipping fasteners developed by North American Aviation. The Seattle and Tacoma plants both needed continuous foundation repairs.