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.
As of the plat filing in 1889, people 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.
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.