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Month: July 2025

Charles H. Baker: Land Investor of the Palatine Hills plat in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

The Fremont neighborhood has a lively history which parallels the story of the City of Seattle’s growth and development.  Just as in the beginnings of Seattle in what is now downtown, the earliest white settlers of Fremont were attracted by the availability of natural resources, most importantly water and timber. As Seattle grew, land investors hoped that a railroad would come through their property, which would increase the value.

Located just to the northwest of Lake Union, Fremont was on the banks of a stream which at first was called The Outlet, flowing westward through today’s Ballard and then out to Puget Sound.  The Outlet was also called Ross Creek and it was used to float logs to mill.  Eventually the creek became part of the route of today’s Lake Washington Ship Canal.

Charles H. Baker came to Seattle in 1887 as a single man determined to make his fortune and establish himself so that he could get married.  He worked as a surveyor for Seattle’s homegrown railroad corporation, the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern.

The survey work brought Charles Baker into contact with Seattle’s movers and shakers including Judge Thomas Burke, Edward C. Kilbourne and William D. Wood, and Baker’s name is seen on land investments with these men, including plats in Fremont and plats in the Wedgwood neighborhood in northeast Seattle.

Charles Baker lived in Seattle for about fifteen years.  During his time in Seattle his land investments failed partly because of the economic depression which began in the year 1893.  Another reason why his investments failed was because they were in lands which were slow to develop, such as today’s Wedgwood neighborhood, which was too far from downtown Seattle to be convenient. Baker platted sections of land for house lots in today’s Wedgwood which did not sell, as the area had no infrastructure such as roads or utilities.

In the 1890s Charles Baker built the power plant at Snoqualmie Falls, only to lose ownership of it when his father died, because of legal issues.  In 1904 Baker gave up on Seattle and moved to Florida.  Even though the Snoqualmie Falls power plant which Baker built continues to supply electricity to Seattle today, few people are aware that it was Charles Baker who made this essential contribution to Seattle.

One of Charles Baker’s early investments (1888) was a plat of land at a high point in western Fremont at N. 43rd Street, which he named Palatine Hill.  The name came from Baker’s home in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.

In later years the streets in the plat had to be renamed for clarity, to eliminate duplicate street names around Seattle. The name Palatine Avenue was used for the former Adams Court (on the far right on the plat map.)  On the left side of the plat map, Crawford shows the boundary with the Crawford family property, which became 3rd Ave NW.

One avenue formerly called Peck was later renamed Baker Ave NW between 2nd Ave NW (Harmon) and 3rd Ave NW (Crawford.)  Chicago Street is now 1st Ave NW.  What was designated as Palatine on the original plat map, is now called NW 43rd Street.  Some of these street name changes reflect Seattle’s 1895 ordinance to reorganize the street naming system.  It was required that north-south routes be called avenues, and east-west was called a street.  That is why plats earlier than the 1895 ordinance, like Baker’s Palatine Hill plat of 1888, have had name changes.  Plats filed from 1895 onward, had to conform to the street system of Seattle and have unique names for their streets, not re-using common names such as Broadway.

For further info:

Fremont in Seattle: Street Names and Neighborhood Boundaries.

Sorting Out Seattle Street Names.

Street Names North of Lake Union.

The Ross and Fremont Post Offices

Posted on by Valarie

Some Seattle-area neighborhoods, like Bothell, were named for early settlers.  With the arrival of the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad in 1887, a railway station could give its name to the neighborhood. 

Just north of Seattle’s Queen Anne hill, the Ross family had land claims on both sides of a stream called The Outlet, which flowed from Lake Union westward out to Puget Sound.  The Ross family gave permission for the new railroad to come across their property and the railroad planners named a station in their honor.  This caused the area to acquire “Ross” as a place name. 

Ross was to the west of Fremont, bordered by 3rd Ave NW, and it included land on the south side of today’s ship canal.  The earliest listings of “Seattle Seminary” (today’s Seattle Pacific University) in the City Directory of the 1890s gave its location as “Ross.”  This also had to do with an actual post office for Ross, so that people could list it as their address.  

The Ross Post Office opens in 1888 

The coming of the SLS&E Railroad gave rise to more commercial development wherever a railway station was built.  There was a general store and a Ross Post Office which opened on July 30, 1888, at 318 Ewing Street, on the south side of The Outlet. Today that address is on the west side of a canalside pocket park, near the present King County Wastewater building. 

The first postmaster of Ross was Alfred J. Villars who had been born in 1843 in Clinton County, Ohio, and had served in the Union Army during the Civil War.  As typical of many Civil War veterans, Alfred Villars married in 1865 after the war, and then the couple gradually moved westward across the USA.  In 1888 Alfred & Harriet were listed in the Seattle City Directory as living in Ross where Alfred was postmaster.  We know, however, that Harriet might have been the “default postmaster” because Alfred had another job.  Perhaps this arrangement was not satisfactory, as another postmaster took over by the end of 1888.

Alfred Villars was a “title abstractor,” someone who researches property ownership so that sales of land can proceed without legal hang-ups.  A title search ensures that there are no outstanding “encumbrances” such as liens against the property.  This work would have meant that Alfred spent most of his time in the King County courthouse in downtown Seattle where records where kept.  

In 1897 the Villars moved away from Ross when Alfred got a job at the downtown Seattle Public Library, where he worked for the next 23 years in the library’s “newspaper room.”  In those days before radio, TV and the Internet, newspapers were vital sources of information.  Newspapers were made available at the Seattle Public Library so that people could read them without a subscription.  

The Ross Post Office closed in 1901.  In 1902 the building at 318 Ewing was referred to as Old Post Office, in a list of polling places for elections. 

Growth of Fremont outstrips Ross 

Although both communities had a railroad stop, in the summer of 1888 the growth of Ross was eclipsed by that of Fremont.  Fremont’s developers set up a lumber mill to help provide for housebuilding, and they advertised that the first hundred people to come to Fremont could buy a house lot for $1.  Fremont, centered around today’s North 34th Street & Fremont Avenue where there was already a bridge across The Outlet, soon boomed with commercial and industrial growth.  In contrast with Ross which was not a planned community, Fremont had developers who planned and organized for growth, including promotion of Fremont in real estate ads in the newspaper.  

The Fremont Post Office opens in 1890   

Fremont’s post office opened on March 25, 1890.  Like the Ross Post Office, at first it operated out of a home on the south side of the existing Fremont Bridge, probably to get clear of the frenzy of building and lumber mill work on the north side of the bridge. 

The first postmaster of Fremont was Thomas C. Ralston, someone who had only arrived in Seattle in 1888.  He joined those going to Fremont for jobs in that first year of the community.  Though he obtained the job of postmaster, it is likely that his wife Ida was the one who was doing that work from their home, while Thomas worked at the lumber mill in Fremont. 

Death of the postmaster

Thomas Ralston’s term as Fremont postmaster was brief.  At age 37 on August 11, 1892, Thomas received a fatal injury while he was unloading logs from rail cars, using a chute to let the logs slide down into the water, at the site of the Fremont lumber mill.  The King County Death Register recorded that Thomas had been struck by a log so that he had an internal hemorrhage (bleeding). 

A Ralston family letter of August 23, 1892, tells that they had heard from Sylvester “Sil” Ralston, brother of Thomas, what had happened to Tom: 
“. . .You ask me if I had heard any more from Sil and if Tom was in Washington yet. Poor man. He is there but under the sod. He was killed the 11th day of this month while unloading logs out of rail cars into the lake. He had unloaded one car… the logs begun to roll down the chute and one of them struck him in the breast and knocked him into the water. There was but one man there with him. He was a car repairer. He got Tom out on the bank and asked him if he was badly hurt and if he should go to get some help.  Tom said, I’ll be all right in a minute. The man soon asked him again and Tom made the same reply, but he then closed his eyes in unconsciousness.  The man laid Tom back on the ground and went for help.  

They took Tom home. The doctor said several ribs were broken, and Tom soon breathed his last. They put a subscription in circulation and realized $102.25. It took $75.00 to pay funeral expenses and the rest was given to his wife Ida. They had a petition going around asking that she be appointed postmistress in his place. It was being signed wherever it went.”     

For the next year and a half, Ida Ralston was listed as postmistress at Fremont but it is likely that there was not enough income for her to support her family.  She was now a widow with four daughters under nine years of age.  In 1894 Ida moved to downtown Seattle where she successfully ran a lodging house. 

Neighborhood names 

At times when there were gaps of service of postmasters, mail for Fremont was directed to the post office of a neighboring community such as Ross or Edgewater.  There was no home delivery of mail; people had to go to the post office to pick up letters.  Newspapers often ran lists of names of people to let them know a letter was waiting for them.   

Edgewater’s post office opened on May 20, 1889. The postmaster was William Ashworth who lived at the present site of the North Transfer Station, on North 34th Street just east of Stone Way.  Like Ross, Edgewater was a railroad stop and a name for a community.  These names didn’t “stick.” Today the former Ross area is referred to as North Queen Anne.  The ship canal, completed in 1917, changed the landscape so that Fremont was defined as on the north side of the canal only. 

The community names of Edgewater and Latona faded away as the name Wallingford gained in common use. Today Stone Way is considered to be the boundary between Fremont and Wallingford.  Now the closest post office which serves the Fremont area is in Wallingford on North 47th Street just east of Stone Way. 

Sources: 

Fremont in Seattle: Street Names and Neighborhood Boundaries.

HistoryLink Essay #494, “Ross Post Office opens on July 30, 1888”, by Greg Lange, 1998.

HistoryLink Essay #508, “Fremont Post Office opens on March 25, 1890”, by Greg Lange, 1998.

Ross School in Fremont.

Street names lookup list: Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside has listed old and new street names in a search table. Most of the street names in Fremont were changed over time. Fremont Avenue, for example, was once called Lake. It was changed because more than one neighborhood was using that name. Beginning in 1895 the City of Seattle tried to rename streets for clarity and so that there would not be duplicate names.

Fremont’s Northeast Corner: Porterfield’s Addition

Posted on by Valarie

Today the defined area of the Fremont neighborhood is bounded by 50th Street on the north, and Stone Way on the east.  Fremont started in 1888 as a convenient streetcar neighborhood.  Little stores sprang up at intersections of streetcar stops and transfer points, like this one at 4900 Stone Way.   

Over time these streets have been expanded for car traffic and now are largely commercial areas.  Today there is a Bamboo Village restaurant at this address, with a parking lot to accommodate cars.   

A Fremont investment in 1888 

From its earliest years, Seattle attracted investors in business, real estate and timber.  Some investors came for a look around, fell in love with Seattle and never left.  Others came and made investments but then went back home.  Edward & Carrie Blewett of Fremont, Nebraska, came to make land investments in Seattle and they gave the name of Fremont to a suburb-like development which was outside of the Seattle City Limits at that time. 

In that year of 1888 when Fremont came into existence, another investor, Theophilus J. Porterfield, came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to survey the opportunities in the Seattle area.  Mr. Porterfield was a “timberman” who had lived in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.  During his visit to Washington Territory in 1888-1889 he invested in some timber property in Snohomish County. 

In December 1888 Mr. Portfield filed a plat map for land he’d purchased in the northeast corner of Fremont, between North 45th to 50th Streets.   The property was bounded on the west side by Woodland Park Avenue where Fremont’s backers were in process of laying out a streetcar line to reach Guy Phinney’s picnic grounds and private zoo. 

Mr. Porterfield brought his wife Elizabeth and daughter Wilhelmina Louise with him to Seattle, and the family stayed at a hotel in Belltown, at First & Battery Streets.  It appears that during their sojourn in Seattle the teenage Mina met and fell in love with Samuel Hauser, who worked at the Hauser family’s building contractors company.  Samuel Hauser had been brought to Seattle as child in the 1870s. His father had worked as a carpenter and then advanced to own a builders contracting business.

The Porterfield family went back to Minneapolis, and as soon as Mina turned 18, in 1891 Samuel Hauser went to Minnesota and they were married.  After their marriage, Samuel & Mina stayed in Minneapolis for several more years, perhaps in deference to Mina’s mother who was probably loathe to lose her only daughter. 

Seattle continues to attract investors in the 1900s 

By the year 1900 major timbermen of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area were closing operations and moving to the Pacific Northwest in search of a fresh supply of trees.  In January 1900 newspapers were full of the story of a blockbuster land sale from railroad magnate James J. Hill to timber industry leader Frederick Weyerhaeuser.  Weyerhaeuser moved his lumber operations to the Pacific Northwest, as did the Laird-Norton Company of Minnesota. 

Perhaps these tales of timber riches were on the mind of Theophilus Porterfield when he suddenly turned up in Seattle in November 1906.  He consulted a Seattle attorney, David McVay, to represent him as administrator of his property, the Porterfield’s Addition, a plat in Fremont.  Mr. Porterfield claimed that his son-in-law, Samuel Hauser, had appropriated the property and wouldn’t give it back to him. 

Mr. Porterfield, who was now 79 years old, had made the long journey by himself from Minneapolis to Seattle by train and had caught cold on the way.  Suddenly on November 30th he collapsed and died while visiting a friend on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.  Fortunately, the attorney, David McVay, had Mr. Porterfield’s background info and was able to contact Mrs. Porterfield in Minneapolis.   

The attorney’s search of property records showed that there never had been a transaction giving the Fremont property to Samuel Hauser, Porterfield’s son-in-law.  Over time, all the lots in the Porterfield plat in Fremont had already been sold, before Mr. Porterfield’s return visit to Seattle in 1906.  Perhaps when the money stopped coming in, Mr. Porterfield became confused and thought there was some fraud. 

The Seattle newspapers had printed the “fraud” story which Mr. Porterfield had told his contacts in Seattle. The newspaper then had to print a retraction, because Samuel Hauser wrote to the newspaper to deny any wrongdoing. He said that he wanted to clear his family’s name, as many of the Hausers still lived in Seattle. 

Today the Porterfield’s Addition in the northeast corner of Fremont still has many old houses, like 1109 North 47th Street.  This area of Fremont is still considered to be very convenient, but now it is because of access to major roadways of car travel like 50th & Stone Way, instead of streetcars. 

Sources:   

Genealogy resources including census, newspaper search and Find A Grave which includes biographical information: Theophilus Porterfield.   

HistoryLink Essay #8115, “James J. Hill,” by Paula Becker, 2007. 

HistoryLink Essay #7295, “Norton Clapp,” by Cassandra Tate, 2005. 

HistoryLink Essay #3285, “Woodland Park Railway begins running in 1890 (Guy Phinney),” by Greg Lange, 2001. 

Laird Norton company history. 

“Minneapolis Man Expires Suddenly,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 1, 1906, page 3. 

A Tribute to Judie

Posted on by Valarie

We all need encouragers in our lives, someone to talk with, work with and pray with!  Judie Clarridge, who died on June 27, 2025, was an encourager of many, and an enormous influence in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.   

Judie’s Christian faith-based life led her to serve in many aspects of the Fremont community, where she used her influence for good.  Judie was an active member of Fremont Baptist Church and of local organizations including the Fremont Neighborhood Council, the P-Patch community garden, the food bank and the Fremont Historical Society. 

Judie was born in Maryland to parents who were academically oriented.  Her father worked as a scientific aide in the Department of Agriculture in the federal government.  Judie attended college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she met her husband, David Clarridge.  They married in 1967 and moved to Seattle in 1969 because of David’s military service.  David went on to get an accounting degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. 

At the time of David Clarridge’s death from cancer in 2007, the couple were well-involved in community projects.  Judie was able to see through to the completion of a project David had started, the preservation of a lot on their block in Fremont, for a City-owned community garden called the Hazel Heights P-Patch. 

My involvement with Judie began when I joined the Fremont Historical Society in 2008.  While researching the Klondike Gold Rush and its impact upon Seattle, I discovered that David & Judie were the authors of a book I found at the Seattle Public Library called A Ton of Gold, published in 1972.  When I asked Judie how it was that she & her husband wrote this book, Judie replied with a smile, that the book’s origins were as an “out-of-control research project!”  At Judie’s reply, we both collapsed in giggles because this reference to out-of-control projects was an inside joke between Judie and me. 

In our Fremont historical research Judie and I sometimes started out looking for one thing and ended up finding something else.  One of the best times was our participation in the centennial celebration of Seattle’s ship canal in 2016-2017.   

We started out to research the involvement of Fremont community members in the ship canal’s beginnings in 1916-1917.  In the process, we discovered the story of a Fremont resident who went to the Klondike and whose exploits are documented in historic museums of the Klondike today.  This was one of the best of our “out of control” research projects for the Fremont Historical Society.  Our 2016-2017 explorations from Seattle to the Klondike were a fitting full-circle moment to the research Judie had done with her husband for a book in 1972. 

Judie was chairperson of the Fremont Historical Society for about ten years.  She spent hours patiently listening to me babble excitedly about my many other wandering research quests, and her encouragement kept me going.  Her influence was much treasured and will be much missed. 

Plats of Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

One of the ways to trace neighborhood history is by its land use, including plats of land laid out with streets and house lots. This map of the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle is marked with plats and their names.

The founding of Fremont in 1888 was in the area closest to the ship canal, although at that time it was only a small stream called The Outlet. The plat, which was named Denny & Hoyt’s, was on both sides of the stream, as far south as Florentia Street and to the north, at 39th Street, marked in light yellow on this map. A “plat” is a map of streets and house lots within the borders of a land claim. Plats have names, and the list is shown here, of the plats in Fremont.

Fremont’s original founders bought about 212 acres which had been the homestead land claim of early Seattleite William Strickler. Strickler disappeared in 1861 and the issue of who would come into ownership of his land, was not settled until 1887. Finally, Seattle investors Denny & Hoyt were able to buy this property. They soon re-sold it to the Blewetts, investors who came from Fremont, Nebraska. The Blewetts kept the original plat name which is the large section shown in light yellow on the plat map. Fremont was outside of the Seattle City Limits at that time, so it was founded with its own name, like a suburb.

Over time, many other investors bought sections of land, represented by the different colors in this map. Some investors lived in Fremont themselves, such as Sidney S. Elder, a former pharmacist, who transitioned into real estate work. He named his plat the S.S. Elder’s Orchard Addition. Another Fremont resident was a Civil War veteran, George Boman. His plat of land was named Edgemont to give tribute to Fremont + Edgewater plats nearby, on the eastern edge of the neighborhood near Stone Way.

The red-colored plat in the center of the map is that of B.F. Day, a real estate investor who donated the land for Fremont’s B.F. Day Elementary School. Mr. & Mrs. Day lived nearby and were active in Fremont beginning in the 1880s. When the Days filed their plat, it was technically outside of the original Fremont area, bordering it at North 39th Street. The map here, shows our present-day perception of the Fremont neighborhood which is now considered to have its northern border at North 50th Street.

Directly above B.F. Day’s plat is Sunset Heights (blue slash lines). This plat, filed by two Norwegian immigrant couples, tells the story of life in Seattle in the 1880s-1890s. These landowners did not live in the plat themselves but hoped to derive income from lot sales.