Benjamin Franklin Day was 45 years old when he and his wife Frances arrived in Seattle in the spring of 1880.
Born in Ohio, B.F. Day had farmed in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. Biographical notes indicate that Day wanted to leave farming because of the hard physical labor. We don’t know why he chose to come to Seattle, but as a former farmer who had raised corn & hogs, B.F. Day would have known the importance of railroads in moving products to market. In the 1870s-1880s there was constant speculation about railroad routes across the USA. B.F. Day may have chosen to come to Seattle because he thought that Seattle had a good chance of becoming the terminus of a transcontinental railroad line.
In Seattle B.F. Day worked as a real estate agent and he quickly became involved in civic affairs. He served on City Council in 1883-1884 and he was one of the original members of the Lake Washington Improvement Company which was organized to create a ship canal. The Company’s proposed plan was to widen the stream from Lake Union, flowing westward to Puget Sound, so that logs could be floated to mill and coal barges towed by ships. For this reason, in 1882 B.F. Day began buying land near Lake Union and the future community of Fremont. He believed that the future canal would cause property values to rise around that area on the western shore of Lake Union, so he bought property as an investment.
As of 1888 the Fremont area, from Florentia Street (south side of the bridge) up to North 39th Street, was released from legal impediments so that the land could be opened for settlement. B.F. Day bought tracts of land just north of 39th Street and built his own house there at 3922 Woodland Park Ave North.
As of 1888 when Fremont began to be settled, it was a suburb, outside of the city limits of Seattle, and it had no organized school system. School in Fremont began in a series of temporary locations with parents organizing to pay teachers. In 1889 B.F. Day paid the rent for a building, a vacant storefront at 36th & Aurora, so that it could be used as a schoolhouse.
In 1891 Fremont was officially annexed to the City of Seattle, and the Seattle School District made plans to build a new school in Fremont. As a real estate agent who saw the Fremont community developing, B.F. Day knew that families would be more interested in buying property to settle in Fremont if there was a good school building. He’d seen other neighborhoods with hastily-built wooden school structures which deteriorated or were not big enough. B.F. Day offered to donate property on North 39th Street between Fremont & Linden Avenues, to build a school in Fremont, on the condition that the structure would be well-built and permanent, not temporary.
Architect John Parkinson was hired, and a two-story brick school was built which opened in May 1892. The school form was like the letter H so that more sections could be added onto the original. Fremont grew so much in the 1890s that annexes had to be built to accommodate the growing population of school-age children. Ironically B.F. Day, who never had any children of his own, is best remembered in Seattle history for this school which still serves the children of Fremont today.
Sources:
Seattle School Histories: B.F. Day School. HistoryLink Essay # 10494.
The Life of B.F. Day, Part One and Part Two, Wedgwood in Seattle History blog.