This is a picture of Seattle Washington’s first street car — a horse drawn closed coach that looks like it might seat about ten people, but could accommodate few more standing on the platforms front and back. The side of car has signs reading ‘Second and Front Streets’ at top, the number 4 in the middle, and ‘Seattle Street Railway’ at the bottom. Two horses are hitched to the front to provide power, and the wagon has steel wheels that run in a rail track set in the roadway.

This public domain photo was taken in 1884 by Theodore E Peiser. Peiser was born 1853 in California, and we find him living with his widowed mother in the 1870 census for San Francisco when he was 17 and still a student. By 1880 he is still living in San Francisco, but by that time he was a photographer, probably working for one of the established San Francisco studios. In 1883 he moved to Seattle Washington and opened a photographic studio there on Second Avenue, but it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1889. After that he moved from one studio location to another, but never recovered his former prosperity. In 1907 he returned to California, and in the 1910 census we find him in Modesto, listed as ‘manufacturer of Hair Tonic’. We were unable to locate him in the 1920 census, so he may have been dead by then.