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Category: Land use

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. 

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.

The Sunset Heights Plat in Fremont

Posted on by Valarie

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.