Acquisition Information

Processing Note

Bibliography

Related Materials

Acquisition Information

The bulk of the Puget Sound Power & Light Company records were transferred from the company’s Bellingham office in 1972.  The initial donation included papers and bound volumes generated by approximately forty predecessors and subsidiaries of the parent company. In 1994, CPNWS received additional records documenting the property interests of various companies from Puget Power’s Real Estate office in Bellevue, Washington.   

Processing Note

Curt Ryser initiated work on the Puget Sound Power & Light Company Records in 1987, inventorying oversized volumes and creating a box level inventory. Daniel E. Turbeville III contributed an introduction to this initial finding aid. Initial processing included a 1 in 20 sampling of certain journal entries, vouchers and receipts created by ten of Puget Power’s subsidiary companies (the remainder were destroyed). All sampled records are identified in the current container list for the collection. In 2001, Ruth Steele merged unprocessed material into the main collection, established consistent series and sub-series arrangement and created a comprehensive guide to the Puget Sound Power & Light Company Records. Records relating to the Lake Whatcom Improvement Society and Puget Sound Freight Lines (unrelated to the Puget Sound Power and Light Company) were removed from the collection and are cataloged as separate CPNWS collections. In 2003, Ruth Steele and Amber Raney re-engineered the collection in accordance with Best Practice Guidelines for the Northwest Processing Initiative and the Northwest Digital Archives. In June 2004, Michal Walden merged records created by Puget Sound Power and Light Company, and the Washington Oregon Corporation into the main collection.

Bibliography

Daniel E. Turbeville III, The Electric Railway Era in Northwest Washington, 1890-1930 (Occasional Paper #12: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Washington University, 1978)

Robert C. Wing (ed.), A Century of Service: The Puget Power Story (Bellevue, Washington: Puget Sound Power & Light Company, 1987).

Related Materials

Related material housed at the CPNWS includes the Daniel E. Turbeville Photograph Collection, containing photographs of the street railways and interurban systems around Bellingham. University of Washington Libraries’ Manuscripts, Special Collections, University Archives division at the University of Washington houses records from the Bellingham office of Puget Sound Traction Light & Power (responsible for management and operation of the remaining Bellingham street railway systems following the company’s incorporation in 1912) and numerous of the Puget Power companies involved in regional power distribution.