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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.

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. 

C.P. Stone, Namesake of Stone Way

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Corliss P. Stone was an early businessman, real estate investor, and civic activist of Seattle. 

Stone was born in Vermont in 1838 and worked in what was called a dry goods store, meaning household supplies not including food.  Some dry goods stores eventually evolved to sell clothing only.   

As a young man Stone traveled to San Francisco to investigate the business climate and then he came to the Pacific Northwest.  He worked for a time at Port Madison (north end of Bainbridge Island) which was the site of a lumber mill.  He came to Seattle in 1867 and set up a general store. 

Stone became involved in civic endeavors in Seattle such as trying to improve roads and transportation systems.  He became mayor of Seattle in 1872 at a time when the term of service was only one year.  This was probably because the mayoral position was unpaid, and those in public office still had to support themselves with their own businesses. 

By 1873 Stone’s father had moved to Aurora, Illinois. Stone left Seattle for a time to make family visits in Aurora and to gather more investors for Seattle projects.  Stone’s influence caused his nephew, Edward Corliss Kilbourne, to come to Seattle in 1883 where Kilbourne became one of the founders of the Fremont neighborhood in 1888. 

In 1883 C.P. Stone went in with other investors to lay out streets and house lots in a plat called Lake Union Addition.  This plat was at the south end of what is now Wallingford, centered around Wallingford Avenue & Northlake Way.   

In 1889 C.P. Stone went in together with William Ashworth to plat some land on the east side of what became Stone Way.  William Ashworth’s property was at the present site of the North Transfer Station.  Ashworth & Stone named their plat “Edgewater.” This was a stop on the railroad (present Burke-Gilman Trail.) Like Ross and Fremont which also had postmasters, William Ashworth was the Edgewater postmaster who received the mail brought by rail. 

In 1901 C.P. Stone filed a plat, pictured here, called C.P. Stone’s Home Addition.  The southern line of the plat, marked here as Kilbourne Street, is now North 36th Street.  The platted area was on both sides of Stone Way, and this year of 1901 was when Stone Way acquired its name.  The platted area of streets and house lots extends from the Edgemont plat on the left (today’s Woodland Park Avenue) to Interlake Avenue on the right where it meets the Lake Union Addition. 

Sources: 

For more on the life of Corliss P. Stone, see HistoryLink Essays #197 and #22980, and essay #1251 about his nephew Edward C. Kilbourne.  Kilbourne is credited with naming many of the streets in Fremont, including place names from Illinois such as Albion, Evanston and Aurora.  

Another early land investor in Fremont was Charles H. Baker who was from the Palatine suburb of Chicago.  Some names in western Fremont such as Baker Avenue are part of the Palatine Hills plat. 

Street names conversion table:  Seattle historian Rob K has a lookup table of old and new street names in Fremont.  Putting in the name Kilbourne, for example, will show that the street name was changed to North 36th Street. 

Street names in Seattle — lookup list: The Writes of Way blog.

A House and an Auto Shop at 4031 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the 1930s Stone Way still had private homes but was increasingly mixed with light industrial buildings, gas stations and auto shops. Willam Berry of 4031 Stone Way combined two categories: his family residence and his place of employment.

William Berry had been born in Illinois and came to Seattle as an eighteen-year-old in 1903, hoping to find employment in what he had heard were Seattle’s good economic conditions. William was on the early, leading edge of the automobile service industry. He learned auto mechanics and worked at one of the car dealerships on “auto row,” on Pike Street on Capitol Hill.

By 1917 Berry was able to move into this house on Stone Way with his wife Blanche. Berry established his own auto service shop with the help of an investor (Kinghorn, name noted on the sign). William & Blanche lived in this house until their deaths in the 1950s.

In the early 1960s all the houses on this block, including the Berry’s, were demolished and some single-story retail and office buildings were built. Former stores and offices on this block were Avo Electronics, Big Tree Bikes, Dance Fremont, and some clinics including acupuncture and chiropractic. In the past ten years these smaller buildings have given way to five-story apartment complexes with retail shops at street level. There are no longer any single-family homes on Stone Way in Fremont.

Sources:

Genealogy & City Directory listings.

Photos: On this blog page, click on the Menu tab, and Photos, to see the collection. These photos are from the survey of all taxable structures in King County, which was conducted circa 1938. The photos themselves are kept at the Puget Sound Regional Archives, repository of the property records of King County. The photos are sorted by plat names. The writing on the above photo, “LaGrande Extension,” is the plat name with the notation of Block D, Lot 3. The new building in place of the Berry house, has the same property description.

A House and a Barber at 3521 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

In the 1930s in Seattle there were fewer zoning restrictions, so there were streets which had some businesses mixed in with private homes. The 1938 photo collection of King County showed this house at 3521 Stone Way with a barber shop sign in front of the house. There was a gas station next door at 3525 Stone Way. In the 1930s Stone Way began this transition to all-commercial structures so that there are no houses on Stone Way now. 

In the 1930s residents of the house at 3521 Stone Way were Oscar & Marie Skotdal who had immigrated from Norway in 1923.  We don’t know for sure if Oscar or Marie were the ones who had this sideline of hair-cutting in addition to Oscar’s other job, or if they were leasing out space in their house for a barber.  It would have been a good location for a barber, with gas stations and other businesses close by, a very visible site along Stone Way. 

The Skotdal family came to Fremont in an era when men worked very hard at unskilled labor in mills and factories.  City Directory employment listings of Oscar Skotdal showed that he worked in wood products shops such as millwork, and operating machinery at a barrel factory. 

The Skotdal family lived in this house for about fifteen years and raised three sons here.  In 1959 the house and the gas station next door were demolished and a company, Daly’s Paint and Decorating, built their building here at the southwest corner of North 36th Street & Stone Way.  After Daly’s closed in 2018, the building has been utilized for retail storefronts including a coffee shop. 

Sources:   

Genealogy & City Directory listings. 

Fremont Photos: At the top of this page, click on “Menu” and “Photos” to see the collection. 

HistoryLink Essay #3692, “King County Land Use Survey,” by Paula Becker, 2002. 

Puget Sound Regional Archives: repository of the property records of King County.

The 3401 Stone Way Gas Station

Posted on by Valarie

Cars began to appear in Seattle in the early 1900s but it wasn’t until the 1920s that cars became affordable and the numbers of them increased.  Companies such as the Golden Rule Bakery in Fremont, acquired fleets of vehicles to use for deliveries.  The rise in car use in Seattle naturally caused an increase in gas stations along arterial streets like Stone Way. 

In the 1930s the gas station at 3401 Stone Way, pictured here, was operated by Olaf Johnson, an immigrant from Norway.  He lived in the Fremont Hotel, which was lodgings on the second floor of the Fremont Building at 3429 Fremont Avenue (the same building that is there today).  Mr. Johnson would have taken his meals at any of the nearby cafes such as the Fremont Cafe at 702 North 34th Street. 

In about 1940 another immigrant, William Henry Batten from England, acquired this business and renamed it the Cheerio Service Station.  Mr. Batten, born in 1889 in Cornwall, had served with the British Army in the First World War, 1914-1918. Mr. Batten may have wanted to change his life and make a fresh start after the war.  He & his wife immigrated to the USA in 1920 and he worked as an auto mechanic.   

At the onset of the USA’s entry into the Second World War, in 1942 Mr. Batten was required to fill out a draft card, even though he was 53 years old and not expected to serve in the war.  Along with the description of his height & weight, on the draft registration card it was noted that Mr. Batten had a bullet crease along the left side of his head, an indication of a close call during the First World War. 

In the 1950s a younger man, Eskil Hannus, helped run the Cheerio Service Station & mechanic shop.  Mr. Hannus was born in Idaho in 1914, of parents who had immigrated from Finland. 

Today at this site is Stoneway Court line retail shops.   

Sources: 

Genealogy & City Directory listings. 

HistoryLink Essay #957, “First Automobile Arrives in Seattle on July 23, 1900,” by Greg Lange, 1999. 

John B. Agen’s Addition in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

In the years 1937 to 1940, King County, Washington, undertook a project to photograph every existing building.  As photographers fanned out to neighborhoods, sometimes local children wanted to get in the picture, as in this photo of a house at 4115 Midvale Avenue North in the Fremont neighborhood. 

We may speculate that the younger boy in the photo is three-year-old Ronald Cettie, the child of the house in the background, 4115 Midvale Ave N.  The other boy might be his neighbor, four-year-old Dale Hyldahl of 4125 Midvale Ave N.  Perhaps on this day, Dale sought out a playmate, Ronald, at Ronald’s house. 

Perhaps the basement doors which are standing open, are an indication that the boys had been playing there and came out when they saw the photographer.  Perhaps Ronald’s Great-Aunt Lena was hanging laundry in the basement and momentarily lost track of the boys.  The shadow of death was over this house as Ronald’s mother had died when he was only six months old.  Not long after this photo Mr. Cettie, Ronald and Aunt Lena moved to Wallingford.  Ronald grew up, attended Lincoln High School and the University of Washington in Seattle.  Aunt Lena kept house for Ronald & his father until her death in 1966. 

The writing on the photo, “John B. Agen,” is not the name of the homeowner at 4115.  It is the legal description of the property with the plat name of John B. Agen’s Addition, Block 1, Lot 8.  The plat comprises only two-and-a-half blocks between Woodland Park Ave to Midvale Ave to Stone Way. 

John B. Agen was a Seattle businessman who dominated the dairy products industry in Seattle from 1890 to 1916.   He did not live in the Fremont neighborhood, but this two-block section of property which was platted into house lots, came to be owned by Agen by way of B.F. Day.  B.F. Day was an early resident of Fremont who was a community activist and who donated land for building the present B.F. Day School.   

Like many people in Seattle, B.F. Day was badly affected by the economic crash known as the Panic of 1893.  In a court case ten years later, Mr. Day was questioned as the whether he was “hiding” any money.  He explained that during the 1890s some of the land he had owned, had been transferred into the names of other people so that Day would not lose the property. 

One of those people was John B. Agen.  Mr. Agen helped B.F. Day financially during the 1890s with the expectation that Agen would recover the money later, when the economy improved, by platting the land into house lots. 

John B. Agen had been a successful dairy production businessman in Iowa until, at age 33 in 1889, he decided to see whether he might expand his business to Seattle.  He arrived just days after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.  At first, because of his network of suppliers and storage in Iowa, he was able to bring products from there to Seattle, until he set up local contacts and networks of dairy farmers. 

Agen gained the title of “Father of the Dairy Industry of the Pacific Northwest” for his manufacturing of tinned butter and evaporated milk which was carried by miners to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.  Agen also established stores in Dawson, Valdez. Nome and Skagway. 

Agen went through all the highs and lows of life in Seattle.  He was a successful businessman, but experienced the death of his first wife, Catherine, age 30, in 1894.  She left behind the Agen’s seven-year-old son, John Stuart Agen.  John Agen Sr. remarried in the year 1900, a young woman who, like himself, had Irish immigrant parents.  John & Florence Agen had three children together.  

Approaching age 60 in 1916, John Agen began selling his businesses and he then lived on income from investments.  Agen got pneumonia and died in 1920 at age 64.  His widow Florence & her children spent the rest of their lives in Seattle where they were active contributors to the community.  John Agen’s eldest son whose mother was Catherine, was well-known in Seattle as a real estate dealer.

Sources: 

The life of B.F. Day. 

Genealogical & City Directory resources. 

HistoryLink Essay #3692, “King County Land Use Survey,” by Paula Becker, 2002. 

Wikipedia essay:  John B. Agen’s warehouse at 1201 Western Avenue in Seattle. 

The Washington Mantel Company

Posted on by Valarie

Beginning in the 1920s, Stone Way in Fremont was lined with many construction-related companies.  There were suppliers of brick & tile, carpentry, cement work, electricians, painting, plaster & stucco, and flooring contractors.  

In 1925 with co-investors, Frank Ostermeyer opened the Washington Mantel Company at 3425 Stone Way.  The designation of “mantels” (the shelf above a fireplace) was not inclusive of every kind of work the company did.  Over the years the company also dealt in brick, tile and stucco materials as well as their original business, slabs of marble or granite which were used for smaller installations such as fireplace mantels.  The “secret” to their supply of materials was that the building was owned by the Braida family, workers in art mosaic, marble, granite and terrazzo, who lived back-to-back with the Washington Mantel building. 

The Braida house at 3408 Woodland Park Avenue is one of only a few residences in Fremont which have been historically landmarked. The house started out in 1901 as a one-story structure.  John Braida bought the house in 1915 and had it raised up so that the ground floor became his workshop, and the original house, now on the second floor, was the Braida family residence.  Braida was an influential worker in the prosperous building boom of the 1920s in Seattle.  One of his well-known works is the elephant which is at 8800 Aurora Avenue, at the Aurora Rents business (formerly the Aurora Flower Shop). 

Franklyn Peter Ostermeyer was born in 1899 in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, where his German immigrant grandparents had settled in the 1870s.  After Frank was born, his parents began a western migration. Along the way, Frank’s sister was born in Colorado.  The family settled in Tacoma, Washington, in the early 1900s where Frank’s father worked at the shipyard. 

By the time Frank was 25 years old both of his parents were deceased.  Frank married and the couple moved to Seattle where Frank started working at Washington Mantel Company in 1925.  Work went well until the onset of the economic depression of the 1930s, when work became hard to find.  When people don’t have money, the construction industry comes to a near standstill.  During the 1930s Frank Ostermeyer added several sidelines, such as a stucco manufacturing, and he also became an installer for sawdust burners, a kind of stove for heating with sawdust.  In 1938 the name of Frank Ostermeyer appeared along with others in a newspaper ad for “guaranteed” good workmen. 

We may say that working with brick, marble, stone & tile needs an artistic application.  In his sixties, Frank Overmeyer became a noted artist of oil paintings, with exhibits in local galleries.  His son Denis became an art instructor at Shoreline Community College. 

In 1973 the former Washington Mantel building at the southwest corner of 35th & Stone Way was transformed into the workspace of a maker of custom-built bicycles. 

Sources: 

Braida house, 3408 Woodland Park Avenue on the Seattle Historical Sites Index. 

Fremont’s Elephants including the 8800 Aurora Avenue North sign at Aurora Rents.

Genealogical and newspaper references. 

Robinson Tile & Marble Company:  John Braida worked together with this company.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 28, 1938, page 17, advertisement for workmen: brick & tile, carpenters, cement work, electrician, painting, plastering & stucco.  Frank Overmeyer was listed as a “guaranteed good worker” in brick & tile. 

The Golden Rule Bakery

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The Golden Rule Bakery was a major employer in Fremont from 1920 to 1964. It started with one production plant at 4450 Fremont Avenue and expanded into a second building at 3665 Stone Way where the company could park its one hundred delivery vehicles. Stone Way Electric occupied the building at 3665 Stone Way from 1974 to 2000. Both of the Golden Rule buildings have been demolished.

The Golden Rule Bakery was founded by an Irish immigrant, William Henry Pemberton, and two investors. Shortly after starting the business in 1918, Pemberton was arrested for refusing to fill out a draft card. World War One was winding down and, at age 29, Pemberton was unlikely to be drafted into active war service, but he still refused to sign a card, because he said he was a conscientious objector. Pemberton was jailed until 1920. His co-founders of the bakery carried on with the business until he was released.

The bakery was so successful that they built a second production facility in 1922 at 3665 Stone Way. But beginning in 1925, the company came under intense pressures of the growing labor movement in Seattle. Workers of many kinds, from waitresses to factory workers and delivery drivers, were organizing. Labor leader Dave Beck and the Teamsters were accused of trying to intimidate the delivery drivers of Golden Rule and were also accused of a plot to blow up the Golden Rule building at 4450 Fremont Avenue.

Pressure intensified in 1936 when labor leaders organized a boycott of Golden Rule products so that stores would no longer carry that brand. At this critical moment, company president William H. Pemberton died at age 47 on May 9, 1936. Four weeks later, the Golden Rule employees voted to unionize.

Sources:

Genealogy records; newspapers.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, February 24, 1931, page 15, and February 28, 1931, page 3: Bomb plot thwarted at the Golden Rule production plant at 4450 Fremont Avenue.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, April 17, 1936, page 12: Dave Beck & the Teamsters organization were charged with making attacks on the Golden Rule delivery drivers.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, May 12, 1936, page 14: Funeral for W.H. Pemberton, president of the Golden Rule company.

University of Washington Civil Rights and Labor History page: Labor organizing events of the year 1936 in Seattle.

Reference: The Golden Rule Bakery is mentioned in the book, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. The main character, Joe Rantz, re-encounters his father Harry in Seattle where Harry is working as a delivery driver for the Golden Rule Bakery. Page 160-161: Joe goes to the Golden Rule Bakery in Fremont and meets up with his father for the first time in more than five years. His father, Harry, was a vehicle maintenance worker for the delivery trucks at the bakery. Page 210: Harry Rantz was living on Bagley Avenue in Wallingford while Joe was in college at the University of Washington.

Sidney Elder’s Orchard Addition

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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

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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. 

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

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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

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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

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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. 

Plats of Fremont

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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.

The Sunset Heights Plat in Fremont

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In 1871 in Norway, 21-year-old Oline Anrud married Hans Onsum, and the couple set out to start new lives in America.  They touched down briefly in Wisconsin before continuing the westward journey to Seattle in Washington Territory.   

In the 1870s and 1880s the couple spent some time in Seattle, where Hans had a meat market, and some time in rural Snohomish County. Perhaps Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, made the couple decide that they would settle in the city where explosive population growth post-Fire, created the best economic opportunities.  The Onsum family with their four children settled in a home on “Madison Heights,” on the hill above downtown Seattle. 

In 1883 Oline’s younger brother Ole Anrud followed the Onsums to the USA with the same pattern of stopping in Wisconsin, before arriving in Seattle.  Ole Anrud worked as a watchmaker until, in 1887, he could afford to get married.  He returned to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for the wedding.  By June 1887, Ole and his bride, Mathilde, were living in Woodinville near Seattle, as recorded by census enumerator Ira Woodin. 

In 1889 the two couples, Hans & Oline Onsum and Ole & Mathilde Anrud, went in together on a real estate investment on the growing edge of a new community, Fremont.  Fremont, located north of Seattle’s Queen Anne hill, had been organized as a plat in 1888 with lots marked out for houses and businesses. It was outside of the Seattle City Limits at that time and it had been organized with a separate name like a suburb.   Fremont’s total land area was about 212 acres, reaching from the present site of Seattle Pacific University, up to today’s North 39th Street, with Fremont Avenue as the centerline of the community.  

The Anrud & Onsums plat was on undeveloped land on the north side of Fremont from 42nd to 45th Streets.  Their plat, which they named Sunset Heights, was on a high elevation with good views, and with Phinney Avenue at its centerline.  The Anruds & Onsums did not live in Sunset Heights themselves; it seems that it was a real estate investment where they intended to derive income from selling lots.

As of the plat filing in 1889, property owners could give the streets in their plat, any names that they chose.  The original plat map shows that today’s Phinney Avenue was first called Onsum Avenue, and today’s Francis Avenue was called Anrud.  The engineer who surveyed to lay out and measure the lots, was R.H. Thomson, later to become famous for his plan to flatten the hills of Seattle.  The Sunset Heights plat document was notarized by Percy Rochester, an attorney specializing in real estate along with his business partner George Boman who was himself a resident of the Fremont area. 

The Sunset Heights plat was filed with King County on May 6, 1889, and the timing could not have been better.  Just thirty days later, Seattle’s Great Fire knocked down quite a few blocks of the downtown business district but it resulted in a do-over and an economic boom.  People streamed into Seattle to get in on the rebuilding of the city, and those people needed places to live.  In the year following the Fire, more than 400 plats were filed in King County, and property investors like the Onsums & Anruds were able to sell lots for houses.  

As of 1890, the Onsum and Anrud families seemed settled and prosperous in Seattle.  But within the next ten years, both Hans Onsum and Ole Anrud would die, and their widows would be left to find financial resources to finish raising their children. 

At age 42 in 1897, Ole Anrud was bitten by Gold Fever, or perhaps by a desire to see if there would be good investment opportunities in the Yukon.  In June 1898 Ole set out on a small freight steamer, which was swamped in turbulent waters at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska. Ole Anrud was one of the eighteen passengers who drowned. 

Less than six months later, Hans Onsum, age 54, succumbed to health problems. 

Oline Onsum with her four children, and Mathilde Anrud with three children, all under age 21, had to find a way to support their families.  Real estate transactions recorded in Seattle newspapers showed that they still could derive income by selling some lots in Sunset Heights.  By the year 1900, Oline had opened her house to boarders as a source of income.  Mathilde took a different route; she returned to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to live with relatives. 

By the year 1910, Mathilde Anrud’s oldest two children, ages 21 and 17, were working as stenographers for the railroad in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  Mathilde’s three children, Mildred, Arthur and Helen, eventually all returned to live in the Pacific Northwest where they married and pursued their careers.  Mathilde, who stayed in Wisconsin, died unexpectedly at age 74 in 1938 while on a visit to her daughter Helen, in Blaine, Washington. 

Oline Onsum and her children stayed in Seattle, where all four married and found careers.  Oline died at age 77 in 1927.  

We have the Sunset Heights plat in Fremont to remember the story of these two Norwegian-immigrant families and the impact of historical events including the founding of the Fremont neighborhood, the Seattle Fire and the Yukon Gold Rush.  

Sources: 

Genealogical resources including census; newspaper search. 

House histories: Here is a story of a house in Sunset Heights: 4202 Phinney Ave North.

Plat maps:  King County Parcel Viewer shows the legal description of each house including plat name, and on the right margin of the page is a link to the plat map. 

Sorting out street names: Beginning in 1895, Seattle began to change street names so that there would only be one street with any given name. “Lake,” for example, was used in several places around the city and was the original name of Fremont Avenue. Some other neighborhood got to keep “Lake”. Several more streets in Fremont had their names changed in the early 1900s.

The Fremont Neighborhood in Seattle is Founded in 1888

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Each neighborhood of Seattle proudly waves the banner of its unique name, and yet many were named in a similar way:  by real estate investors.   Fremont in Seattle was also named by real estate investors.  What made the Seattle neighborhood called Fremont stand out from others, was its good location, its jump-start after Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889, and its vigorous developers who utilized the growing streetcar system to advantage.

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