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Author: Valarie

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

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 and in 1979 Peter Larson was commissioned to add a pergola with lights. The lights had been knocked out in a 2023 car crash and 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

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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.

The Hocking Fuel & Lumber Company at 3616 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

Many of us have never seen a lump of coal, nor have we ever been in a building which was heated by a coal furnace. Coal is a sedimentary rock used primarily as fuel.

In Seattle’s early years, coal was considered to be so important that railroads were constructed to retrieve it and carry it into the city. As a rock-like substance, coal is heavy — a five-gallon bucket of coal weighs about forty pounds. In the 1880s in Seattle, cars and trucks had not yet been invented and so the best way to carry coal, was via railroad. The original purpose of the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad was to reach resources such as the coal mines east of Seattle. This rail route is now commemorated as the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Coal was a common fuel source in Seattle up until about 1950, when most houses had converted to oil or electric furnaces. Pictured here as of 1938, was Fremont’s own coal seller, the Hocking Fuel & Lumber Company at 3616 Stone Way.

Thomas James Hocking was born in Cornwall, England, in 1885 and came to Seattle in 1914. He networked with other coal & lumber dealers in Seattle and he joined Fremont’s Doric Lodge, which was a place for businessmen to network and share concerns. In 1934 he was one of a consortium of coal dealers who complained that the City Board of Public Works did not have a fair and open process for bids for coal contracts, for heating City buildings.

The economic depression of the 1930s was hard on businesses. Mr. Hocking found a way to derive more income by allowing another business to build a shop at one end of his property and pay rent to him. The Stoneway Millwork Company at 3620 Stone Way bought lumber from Mr. Hocking to make wood components such as window sashes, railings, doors and cabinets.

Today the smaller building at 3620 Stone Way still stands. It is surrounded by the large Public Storage building at 3616 Stone Way which replaced the former fuel & lumber yard.

Fremont in 1893

Posted on by Valarie

The Sanborn Insurance Company produced this map in 1893, showing the main business intersection of Fremont. For fire insurance purposes, the map was meant to show whether structures were built of wood, brick, or masonry, and how close they were to other structures.

The street names shown here, are the original ones chosen by Fremont’s developers, before standardization by the City of Seattle. “Lake” is now Fremont Avenue, the cross-street “Ewing” is North 34th Street, and above it, Blewett is now North 35th Street. Thomas Ewing was a developer and real estate agent who helped in the organizing of the street grid. Blewett was the name of the people who came from Fremont, Nebraska, and invested in this land tract.

“Canal” is visible, which was really just a streambed called The Outlet, before creation of the present ship canal.

Florentia Street at the bottom of the map still exists, and this is where the present-day Fremont Bridge reaches the south side of the ship canal. A landmark building on that corner of Florentia is the former Bleitz Funeral Home which has been redeveloped as an office building.

For further info:

Fremont first settled in 1888.

Fremont Street Names.

The Burke-Gilman Trail in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

The Burke-Gilman Trail, a walking-biking corridor which passes through Fremont, is the legacy of early Seattle movers-and-shakers, Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman.  The energy and activism of these men characterized the era of the 1870s-1880s when the population of Seattle began to grow and the city sought to make something of itself. Burke & Gilman transformed the city with their promotion of transportation projects. 

Early Seattleites had already noted that there was a creek flowing westward from Lake Union through what is now Fremont and on out to Puget Sound.  Early Seattleites hoped to widen and deepen this stream to accommodate ships. Known as The Outlet or Ross Creek, the level ground of this area was also an ideal route for a railroad, crossing east-west along the northern shore of Lake Union.  But neither objective, a rail line or a canal, could be achieved until the property ownership issues were resolved.   

Thomas Burke was 25 years old when he arrived in Seattle in 1875 with a law degree in hand.  He became a noted civic activist, joining in with others who were working on trying to get a railroad line into Seattle, and trying to get a ship canal built from Lake Union westward to Puget Sound.  Both the railroad and the ship canal would be used to move raw materials like timber and coal and manufactured items like bricks, to the port on Seattle’s downtown waterfront. 

An area of 212 acres centered at what is now North 34th Street & Fremont Avenue, had been the 1854 homestead land claim of a man named William Strickler.  Stricker disappeared in 1861 and the legal issues of who actually owned the property, went unresolved.  As a result, no one else could acquire the property to develop it, or put through a railroad line, or work on creating a larger channel to accommodate ships. 

Finally in 1887 Thomas Burke found a way to break the legal logjam by bringing suit for the property taxes on Strickler’s land.  Since the heirs of William Strickler did not take action, the future-Fremont land was put up for auction.  In 1888 the Blewetts, investors from Fremont, Nebraska, along with their Seattle co-developers, began laying out streets and house lots in Fremont.  At that same time, Thomas Burke and the railroad committee started putting through the railroad line which today is in the same place as the trail named for him and for activist Daniel Hunt Gilman. 

Daniel Gilman arrived in Seattle in 1883 with a background of multiple areas of expertise.  He was a Civil War veteran from Maine, who’d seen the importance of railroads which had been vital for moving men and supplies during the war.  After the war Gilman worked as a merchant in New York and he also gained a law degree.  Gilman became the key fundraiser for the Seattle railroad which Burke & the committee wanted to have.  They needed investors from “back East” to put up money for the project. Daniel Gilman made several fundraising trips to line up financial backing for Seattle’s home-grown railroad. 

By 1888 the railroad, called the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern, was chugging its way through Fremont along the banks of Ross Creek – not yet a ship canal.  That ship canal project would not come to completion until it was constructed in 1911-1917. 

In 1971, at a time when the railroad era was ending, a group of activists in the Wedgwood neighborhood came up with the “rail to trail” idea.  Their efforts successfully preserved the rail line which is now called “Seattle’s longest park,” and was named the Burke-Gilman Trail. 

For more info: 

More background details about the lives of Judge Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman, a blog article on the Wedgwood in Seattle History page.

The story of William Strickler. 

Pioneers of Fremont: John Ross. 

The founding of Fremont in 1888. 

Wedgwood’s Trailmakers: the Burke-Gilman Trail. 

George Boman’s Edgemont Plat

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After the Civil War (1861-1865) war veterans began migrating westward, and some made their way to Seattle.  George Boman from Tennessee arrived in Seattle in 1875 and became a real estate investor. 

In Boman’s home state of Tennessee, during the Civil War some men enlisted to fight with the Union, and some enlisted with the Confederacy.  Perhaps feeling that his life might be in danger because he had fought for the Union, Boman never went back home after the war.  He went across the border to a Kentucky town which had been a Union stronghold.  After a year or so he went to Nebraska where he exercised his right as a Union veteran, to a land claim. 

Boman’s life fits the pattern of many Civil War veterans who heard of Seattle and thought there would be good opportunities to get in on the growth of the city.  Boman invested in Seattle’s street railway system and was a member of the ship canal committee.  His most profitable investments were in land, and he had very good timing of investing north of Lake Union.  Boman moved to what is now Woodland Park Avenue, in 1883.    

Boman’s land investment benefited from the nearby founding of Fremont in 1888.  The boundary line of Fremont was at Albion Avenue.  Boman’s property was just outside of that line, between Albion and what is now Stone Way.  Boman had built a dock and the little steamers which plied Lake Union could let people off there, an ideal situation for a real estate promotor to meet clients. 

After the Great Seattle Fire in June of 1889, land values soared and many more people moved out north of the city.  At that time the areas north of Lake Union were outside of the Seattle city limits, so Fremont was founded with its own name, like a suburb. 

In January 1890 Boman filed a land plat, indicating that he had house lots for sale. Plat filers give their plat a name and we see that the name Edge + Mont gave tribute to the neighborhoods on either side of the Boman’s property.  To the left (west) was the Fremont neighborhood.  To the right (east of Stone Way) was Edgewater.  The name Boman Avenue was first given to what was later renamed Woodland Park Avenue North. 

For more info:  

Series of articles on the life of George Boman.