Blog

Author: Valarie

Valarie was born in Seattle and is a volunteer neighborhood history writer.

House history: 4415 Baker Ave NW

Posted on by Valarie

The two men who worked together to build this Craftsman-style house in 1910, were both Norwegian immigrants. They both lived near NW 73rd Street in Ballard at the time that they contracted to build 4415 Baker Ave NW in western Fremont. The builder of the house was Peter B. Nelson, a carpenter.

The owner of the house was Captain Martin Rolie, pilot of the Sumner, a steamer which traveled to Alaska to catch halibut. In 1913 Captain Rolie married in Seattle, a woman who had been born in the USA of Norwegian parents. By 1920 the census showed that Martin & Marie Rolie had three children, and Capt. Rolie had brought three of his siblings to live in the USA. All were living in the house at 4415 Baker Ave NW. Capt. Rolie’s two brothers were working as fishermen and his sister Astrid, age 24, worked in a tailor shop. It is possible that the Rolie’s next-door neighbor, Humphrey R. Roberts of 4435 Baker Ave NW, helped Astrid get a job, because Mr. Roberts was owner of a tailor shop.

The term “Craftsman” describes a style of house which often came from a plan book and could be completed by craftsmen such as carpenters, stonemasons and cabinetmakers. A Craftsman house has a foursquare appearance with a pitched roof, wide front porch with supporting pillars, and details such as the diamond windowpanes at the sides of the second story. This house is 26 feet wide at the front and 41 feet long. There is a partial second floor and a total of four bedrooms. The most outstanding Craftsman details of this house are on the interior with its fine woodwork, built-in cabinets and window seats. The house still has its original leaded-glass bookcases and dish cupboards.

The name “Baker Avenue” is a reference to Charles Baker, the early landowner who filed a plat called the Palatine Addition where the streets and house lots were laid out.

Sources:

Census and City Directory listings.

City of Seattle building permit #96239 of 1910, shows name of contractor and name of house owner.

Find A Grave Memorials #157073212 (Martin Rolie) and #156986296 (Marie Rolie)

South of the Bridge: Then and Now

Posted on by Valarie

When the ship canal was completed in 1917, it created a change in the definition of the boundaries of the Fremont neighborhood. There had been a Fremont Bridge (over a small stream) before the ship canal and “Fremont” had included the area on the south side. The area as far south as Florentia Street, now on the south side of the bridge, was part of a plat called Denny & Hoyt’s which defined the original Fremont. But once the wide channel of the ship canal was created, the south side came to be defined as Queen Anne area.

In those early years after creation of the ship canal, the areas along its banks were quite industrial & commercial. One of the early businesses was Bleitz Funeral Home, a very visible building which still stands today on the south side of the Fremont Bridge. The Bleitz building, which is historically landmarked, and an addition on its west side have been renamed Fremont Crossing, an office complex.

Next to Bleitz an early business was Canal Iron Works, defined as a blacksmith shop. A blacksmith might do any kind of welding, including fabrication or repair of metal tools. In the booming housing industry in the 1920s, the shop might have made stair railings and fireplace screens for home use.

From the 1920s to 1940s Canal Iron Works was owned by Eric Hager, a Swedish immigrant. When the Hager family’s two sons got jobs at the Navy Ship Yard at Bremerton, the entire family moved to Kitsap County. The next owner of the shop, Danish immigrant Carl V. Torp, renamed it Ornamental Iron Works, as shown in this 1958 photo.

In 1990 a new building, Ponti Seafood Grill, was built on the old ironworks site. This popular restaurant was built with patios and overlooks to the interesting boat traffic on the ship canal. The restaurant closed in 2016 when the owners retired, having received an offer from the Queen Anne Elks Club to buy the building.

Sources:

Bleitz Funeral Home at 316 Florentia Street, now an office building called Fremont Crossing.

Ponti Seafood Grill info.

The founding of Fremont in 1888: the original land area was from Florentia Street on the south, up to North 39th Street, called the Denny & Hoyt plat.

Photo: our thanks to Christine Cameron who shared this photo of the iron shop then-and-now. Mr. & Mrs. Torp were her “foster great-grandparents” because the Torps took in the Jensen children who had been orphaned.

Stone Way in the 1930s: the 3500 Block

Posted on by Valarie

In the past twenty years Stone Way has been transformed from semi-industrial and construction-industry use such as electrical and plumbing companies, to a gleaming row of apartments and office buildings. Today the 35 Stone Office Building has replaced the old-time businesses in the 3500 block.

In the 1930s Fremont & Wallingford were already inside of the Seattle City Limits, and homes had electricity, but there was still use of coal, hay and kindling for woodstoves or fireplaces. Some people kept chickens, too, and horse-drawn road-grading equipment was still in use. The Stoneway Hay & Grain Company at 3500 Stone Way, continued operating into the 1950s.

Immigration had slowed in the 1930s and now there were more first-generation American businessmen in Fremont. Rasmus Rasmussen of Stoneway Hay & Grain had been born in Iowa of parents who immigrated from Denmark. August J. Kirchner, owner of the neighboring business at 3504 Stone Way, had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, of parents who had immigrated from Germany in the 1880s. Kirchner’s business on Stone Way was called Chief Rug & Mattress Company.

At the north end of the 3500 block of Stone Way in the 1930s was Eastern Fuel Company, Socrates A. Geftax, President. Mr. Geftax had changed the spelling of his name from Geftakis, perhaps for ease of pronunciation. He was an immigrant from Meropy, Greece who came to Seattle in 1929 and spent the rest of his life here. Mr. Geftax had two co-investors at the fuel yard but he lived on-site himself.

By the 1950s this block of Stone Way had one-story office buildings — no more hay, grain, or mattresses. The present tall building at 3500 Stone Way, completed in 2024, represents the third era in the evolution of this block.

A brick at Troll’s Knoll

Posted on by Valarie

The Friends of Troll’s Knoll is a community group dedicated to preserving and maintaining the green space around the Fremont Troll on North 36th Street, under the Aurora Bridge. The Troll’s Knoll includes a garden area and in recent digging, this paver brick was unearthed. The name stamped on the paver, Denny-Renton, was a company which closed in 1927 and was in what is now part of the Cedar River watershed.

In December 2025 members of the Denny family, the original family who had the brick company, came to Troll’s Knoll for a ceremony to receive back the brick. Photos and story here.

The lights are on again at the “Interurban.”

Posted on by Valarie

The Waiting for the Interurban statue is at the intersection of North 34th Street and Fremont Avenue. It memorializes the former rail line, called the Interurban, which went northward through Fremont to the city of Everett. This transfer point at the intersection, where City of Seattle streetcar lines also converged, did much to give Fremont the reputation of being the “center” of things, the Center of the Universe.

The Interurban statue was created by Richard Beyer in 1978. In 1979 Peter Larsen was commissioned to add a pergola with lights. The lights had been knocked out in a 2023 car crash against a nearby power pole (not a crash at the pergola itself.) Now, as of October 2025, the lights have been restored. Our thanks to the City’s signal technician who did the electrical work, and thanks to the Fremont Neighbor blog for the wonderful night photo of the Interurban lights.

The Hall of Giants: The Story of Fremont and the Troll

Posted on by Valarie

In 1990 the Fremont Arts Council sought proposals for a vacant area on North 36th Street which was directly underneath the Aurora Bridge. Immediately the folktale of the troll beneath the bridge came to mind, and this design proposal won acceptance.

The Fremont Troll became so popular that in 2005, the City of Seattle changed the name of the north-south avenue leading to it, to Troll Avenue. This made it much easier for visitors to Seattle to find the Fremont Troll.

Today the Friends of the Troll’s Knoll volunteer group maintain the area around the Troll and they host events in the adjacent green space with other artworks.

When at the intersection of Troll Avenue and North 36th Street, the view from under the bridge downhill to Lake Union is like that of a medieval castle hall, with the arching piers of the Aurora Bridge. The area of the Fremont Troll thus has its own folklore as part of an imaginative Hall of Giants.

A documentary film, The Hall of Giants: The Story of Fremont and the Troll, tells the story of how the troll was built and how it enhanced community bonds in Fremont. The DVD of the film is now available from the Seattle Public Library system although, after coming available in October 2025, there is already a waiting list for it. The film is also available for rent from Scarecrow Video of Seattle.

Who was B.F. Day?

Posted on by Valarie

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, and that there would be good economic conditions in Seattle. 

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 an adjacent tract 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 form of the school building was like the letter H so that more sections could be added onto the original.  Fremont grew so much in the 1890s that additions 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, articles on the Wedgwood in Seattle History blog.

The Motorline Land Plats in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

Fremont was opened in something like a land rush in the summer of 1888, when lots were first offered for sale. The original area of the landowners was from Florentia Street on the south side of the Fremont Bridge, as far north as North 39th Street. Outside of that area, beginning in 1888 other property owners rushed to have their land surveyed and laid out in lots to sell. A cluster of different landowners began naming their sites “Motorline” as they knew that there were plans for a streetcar line on what is now Woodland Park Avenue North.

A plat for a section of land from North 42nd to 45th Streets in Fremont was filed in November 1889 and named Third Motorline Addition. The property owners were two couples, Frank Harvey Winslow & his wife Mary, and John D. Smith & his wife Margaret. The two families may have become acquainted as neighbors, as both lived on West Garfield Street on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.

Frank Winslow’s life was a classic American story of westward migration. Born in Vermont, he’d lived a few years in Boston where he learned the mercantile business. In his mid-twenties in the year 1861, he went by ship to San Francisco and then to the Pacific Northwest. He found employment as a bookkeeper at the Port Discovery lumbermill in Jefferson County. In 1870 he became a customs inspector and in the 1880s he rose to become US Customs Inspector at Seattle.

Frank Winslow retired in 1889 and it appears that he planned to live from then on, from the profits of real estate investments in Seattle. The Winslows and Smiths combined their holdings to create this plat in Fremont; John D. Smith was a real estate agent in Seattle in the 1880s.

In early years, Seattle property owners were allowed to name the streets in their plat, anything they wanted. This caused streets to have different names along their course. On the right-hand side of this plat map we see that today’s Woodland Park Avenue had been named Motor Avenue. In the 1880s the street had several names, including Boman, for George Boman who lived in the 3500 block.

Finally in 1895 the City of Seattle decreed that the street system would have to be reorganized because there were too many streets with the same names. There was trouble when someone would call in a fire alarm, for example, to “Park Avenue” as there were quite a few. On this map we see that Park was renamed Winslow by the City process. Some names, such as Allen Place substituted for Vermont Street, did not have to do with this plat but was simply done to make the street consistent with adjacent plats of land. The designation of Motor Place was moved to the small segment of street between 42nd and 43rd Streets.

Sources:

Seattle street renaming process, Fremont street names.

Port Discovery Mill, Jefferson County, Washington.

Find A Grave: This free resource often has biographical info posted. You can read more here about the life of Frank Winslow.

Geary’s Radiator Shop at 4900 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

Geary’s Radiator Shop represents the transition of Stone Way from its early semi-industrial businesses such as lumber yards, to today’s restaurants, offices and tall apartment buildings. Today this site has a restaurant (Bamboo Village) and a veterinary clinic. In the early 1960s Mr. Geary sold this property to a developer, who built an office building. It was a real estate office before becoming a restaurant.

Erwin C. Geary was born in Montana, the sixth of eleven children of an Irish immigrant father. Erwin worked on the family farm until he was nearly thirty years old. He married in 1937 and then he & his new wife travelled to Seattle to find work opportunities. A friend, Guy Sanderson, had also farmed in Montana and then established several barber shops in Seattle. He gave Erwin Geary a job at an excellent location, the barber shop on First Avenue at Union Street in downtown Seattle. The location was just a few steps from the Pike Place Market and would have had a lot of shoppers who would stop by for a haircut.

By or before 1950 Erwin Geary was able to own his own business, the radiator shop on Stone Way. We don’t know how he felt about selling the property circa 1960, but perhaps the sale of the site was something that was financially advantageous.

At age 65 in 1972, Erwin Geary was driving on the Alaskan Way Viaduct when he was killed in a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver.

The Stoneway Millwork Company at 3620 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the early 1900s the population of Seattle continued to grow, with about 25% coming from other countries. Scandinavians were among the most numerous, and carpentry was one of the most common occupations among them.

Swedish immigrant Abraham Branlund worked at carpentry and then transitioned into “workshop” work of wood components called millwork. Millwork could include baseboards, molding, doors and wall trim. Branlund incorporated as Stoneway Millwork Company in 1926, building a 748-square-foot workshop at 3620 Stone Way. He leased this space from Thomas Hocking of the adjacent fuel & lumber company.

Branlund was in his sixties and as he transitioned toward retirement, he took on business partners and then sold the business to them. The business was renamed Thomas & Caskey, cabinetmakers. Bert Defern Thomas & Albert Caskey were typical new residents of Seattle in that they’d been born in the Midwest and journeyed across the USA to settle in Seattle in the 1920s.

On a dark November night in 1940, Abraham Branlund was, as a pedestrian, crossing Green Lake Way just east of Aurora, when he was struck by a car and killed.

The little building at 3620 Stone Way has been through a lot of transitions in the past one hundred years. In the 1960s the building became a restaurant, first known at Guy & Hulda’s French Mill Cafe. Today it is Tacos El Lago, with bright decor to stand out from the larger building, Public Storage which surrounds it on three sides.