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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 he also 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 & the children spent the rest of their lives in Seattle where they were active contributors to the community. 

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

Posted on by Valarie

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.

Sidney Elder’s Orchard Addition

Posted on by Valarie

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

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

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

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

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

Coast Carton Company, 4133 Stone Way

Posted on by Valarie

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: 

Genealogy listings including Find A Grave. 

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

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

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

The Ross and Fremont Post Offices

Posted on by Valarie

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.

A Tribute to Judie

Posted on by Valarie

We all need encouragers in our lives, someone to talk with, work with and pray with!  Judie Clarridge, who died on June 27, 2025, was an encourager of many, and an enormous influence in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.   

Judie’s Christian faith-based life led her to serve in many aspects of the Fremont community, where she used her influence for good.  Judie was an active member of Fremont Baptist Church and of local organizations including the Fremont Neighborhood Council, the P-Patch community garden, the food bank and the Fremont Historical Society. 

Judie was born in Maryland to parents who were academically oriented.  Her father worked as a scientific aide in the Department of Agriculture in the federal government.  Judie attended college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she met her husband, David Clarridge.  They married in 1967 and moved to Seattle in 1969 because of David’s military service.  David went on to get an accounting degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. 

At the time of David Clarridge’s death from cancer in 2007, the couple were well-involved in community projects.  Judie was able to see through to the completion of a project David had started, the preservation of a lot on their block in Fremont, for a City-owned community garden called the Hazel Heights P-Patch. 

My involvement with Judie began when I joined the Fremont Historical Society in 2008.  While researching the Klondike Gold Rush and its impact upon Seattle, I discovered that David & Judie were the authors of a book I found at the Seattle Public Library called A Ton of Gold, published in 1972.  When I asked Judie how it was that she & her husband wrote this book, Judie replied with a smile, that the book’s origins were as an “out-of-control research project!”  At Judie’s reply, we both collapsed in giggles because this reference to out-of-control projects was an inside joke between Judie and me. 

In our Fremont historical research Judie and I sometimes started out looking for one thing and ended up finding something else.  One of the best times was our participation in the centennial celebration of Seattle’s ship canal in 2016-2017.   

We started out to research the involvement of Fremont community members in the ship canal’s beginnings in 1916-1917.  In the process, we discovered the story of a Fremont resident who went to the Klondike and whose exploits are documented in historic museums of the Klondike today.  This was one of the best of our “out of control” research projects for the Fremont Historical Society.  Our 2016-2017 explorations from Seattle to the Klondike were a fitting full-circle moment to the research Judie had done with her husband for a book in 1972. 

Judie was chairperson of the Fremont Historical Society for about ten years.  She spent hours patiently listening to me babble excitedly about my many other wandering research quests, and her encouragement kept me going.  Her influence was much treasured and will be much missed. 

Plats of Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

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.

Fremont’s Streetcar Loading Platform

Posted on by Valarie

In 1927 a streetcar loading platform and cutoff route for cars was created at the intersection of Fremont Avenue North and North 34th Street.  This intersection is familiar to us today as the site of the Waiting for the Interurban statue.

As car traffic increased in the 1920s it was found that when the city streetcar or the Interurban rail cars stopped to load passengers at North 34th Street, northbound auto traffic would back up onto the Fremont Bridge.  It seemed that much of the prevailing auto traffic wanted to turn right (east) and a solution was designed to keep the traffic flowing.  A cutoff route was added to the northbound bridge exit ramp so that northbound cars could turn right on North 34th Street.  That created the little platform which today is the home of the Waiting for the Interurban statue.

Today car, pedestrian and bicycle traffic still flow through the intersection and the figures of Waiting for the Interurban, still wait for the Interurban train of old days.

3400 Phinney Avenue North: the original trolley car barn

Posted on by Valarie

The red-brick trolley car barn in Fremont was built in 1905 as a home base for the five lines which traveled around the Fremont, Ballard, Phinney, and Greenlake areas. The parking area had pits below, used by mechanics who repaired the underworking of the cars. On the east side of the building was a yard with a wash tower for cleaning the cars.

The building was the first major streetcar service facility to be built in north Seattle, and it represented the heyday of trolley service under Stone & Webster ownership. The trolley era came to a sudden end in 1941 when the City of Seattle abandoned the system and converted to gas-powered buses. The last streetcar to operate in the City of Seattle stopped at the Fremont Car Barn on April 13, 1941.

During World War Two in the 1940s, the car barn was taken over by the Army and was used as storage space. After the war, the building was used by the Seattle Disposal Company to house garbage trucks.

In 1988 the car barn became the home of Redhook Ale Brewery, with the Trolleyman pub on the northwest corner of the building. From 2006-2025 the car barn was the production facility and retail store outlet of Theo Chocolate.

The Fremont Trolley Car Barn received historic designation in 1989 under the City of Seattle Historic Preservation Program. In 2025, with the departure of Theo Chocolate, the building owners received approval to do some modifications to entryways on the east side of the building. to facilitate new users such as retail shops. Read about it here on the Fremont Neighbor blog: Landmarks Board OKs changes to former Theo Chocolate building – Fremont Neighbor

The Fremont Neighborhood in Seattle is Founded in 1888

Posted on by Valarie

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.

Continue reading “The Fremont Neighborhood in Seattle is Founded in 1888”

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

Posted on by Valarie

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.

Fremont’s Northeast Corner: Porterfield’s Addition

Posted on by Valarie

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.