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Month: August 2025

Sidney Elder’s Orchard Addition

Posted on by Valarie

The notation of “S.S. Elder’s Orchard Addition” on property photos indicates that the building is in a two-block area along North 42nd Street between Woodland Park Avenue to Stone Way. One of the buildings, on the southwest corner of 42nd & Stone Way, is the original Coast Carton Company at 4133 Stone Way.

Mr. Elder arrived just after the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, and he first lived on Jackson Street near the G.O. Guy Drugstore where he worked. By 1890 he was in Fremont and had become the pharmacist at Fremont Drugstore, 3401 Fremont Avenue.

Mr. Elder became a community booster and founded a reading room, forerunner of the Fremont Branch Library.

Mr. Elder seemed to want to keep moving and expanding his business interests. After more than twelve years in the Fremont Drugstore he left the business to become a real estate dealer. In 1906 he filed a plat map, divided into house lots, on land he owned on North 42nd Street. He & his wife Lillian moved to a house they built within the plat, at 1115 North 42nd Street (southwest corner of Midvale Avenue).

We don’t know whether there really was an orchard at Sidney Elder’s Orchard Addition, but there might have been. It wasn’t unusual for people to plant trees on a site where they hoped to eventually build a house, so that the trees would have time to grow. Mr. Elder would also have known that trees, especially those which were ready to bear fruit, would enhance the land value for prospective buyers.

Coast Carton Company, 4133 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the past twenty years we have seen a complete transformation of Stone Way from a light-industrial area to an avenue of modern apartment buildings.  There are still a few old buildings.  Coast Carton Company at 4133 Stone Way, was built as a box factory in 1912 and the building now has retail storefronts. 

In 1906 James L. Norie of Pennsylvania traveled with his father-in-law, Joseph Kaye, to explore the timber resources of the State of Washington.  They had read newspaper accounts that major timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Laird-Norton had left Minnesota and moved to Washington in search of new forests of trees.  Joseph Kaye was also in the lumber business and wanted to try to find a new supply.  He bought a lumber mill in Pilchuck, a mill town near Arlington in Snohomish County, about 40 miles northeast of Seattle. 

A few years later, J.L. Norie brought his family to the Pacific Northwest and operated a lumber mill in Sedro-Woolley, Skagit County. Next, the Norie family moved to Seattle.  Instead of working directly with timber, in 1912 Norie set up a secondary business:  the making of paper boxes from softwood trees such as pine and fir.  Norie built a box factory at 4133 Stone Way (southwest corner of 42nd Street). 

All of James Norie’s family, his parents and siblings, moved to the Pacific Northwest as did those of his wife Martha Kaye Norie.  James & Martha’s son worked at Coast Carton as did James’ nephew Robert, Robert’s wife Lena and daughter Katherine. 

James Norie outlived two wives and continued to manage the box factory until he was in his seventies, in the 1950s.  In 1964 at age 86, Norie attended a reunion at the old ghost-town of Pilchuck, Snohomish County.  He took sick and died in Seattle, two weeks after the Pilchuck reunion. 

Sources: 

Genealogy listings including Find A Grave. 

Plat name: the notation “Elders Orchard” on the Coast Cartons property photo, is the legal description of the plat name. The photo was taken circa 1938 in a survey of all taxable buildings in King County, for property tax assessment.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 8, 1937, page 19:  J.L. Norie’s first wife, Martha, was killed in a car wreck. 

Seattle Daily Times, October 25, 1964, page 98: Lucile MacDonald column about Pilchuck, a vanished town in Snohomish County.