Seattle Trademark History Tour, Part 9: The Milk From Contented Cows

This year, the great city of Seattle, Washington is the location of both the International Trademark Association Annual Meeting (May 19-23) and the American Intellectual Property Law Association Spring Meeting (May 15-17). If you are one of the many lawyers attending these events and you want a Seattle trademark experience, you could do the obvious and visit locations associated with the city's famous modern brands. Alternatively, you could go back in time a bit further.

Washington became the 42nd state in 1889, the same year the Great Seattle Fire destroyed much of the city. A combination of new railroad lines and post-fire construction led to a boom in population and commercial activity. On July 17, 1897, this already-promising economic climate went into hyper-drive when the S.S. Portland arrived from Alaska, heralding the beginning of the Klondike gold rush. The trademark disputes that arose from this economic activity started working their way into the published opinions of the Ninth Circuit and the newly christened Washington Supreme Court in the first decades of the twentieth century.

We took a look at the first ten trademark disputes involving the city of Seattle (which date from the turn of the century up to the start of World War I). To our delight, we found them riddled with connections to celebrities, shootouts, world politics and the multicultural fabric of migration in the American west. So, if you need something to do in Seattle, why not review our ten part Seattle Trademark History series. You can even create your own Seattle Trademark History Tour by consulting our handy map (also reprinted at the end of this post) and visiting one of the locations that gave rise to these disputes. This is Part 9. You can find the other nine parts of the series (once they are published) by clicking here.

"The Milk from Contented Cows"

In 1899, North Carolinian Elbridge Amos Stuart founded the Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company in Kent, Washington. In 1901, he changed the name to the Carnation Evaporated Milk Company, and began selling CARNATION brand, the milk "from contented cows." Because fresh milk was not universally available, the product filled a market need and flew off the shelves.

Just 19 miles up the road in Seattle, Charles Frye was packing meat. Frye had moved to Seattle from Iowa in 1885 and started a meat packing company, which boomed into a major food empire during the Klondike gold rush. Frye also opened retail markets...