Fremont was opened in something like a land rush in the summer of 1888, when lots were first offered for sale. The original area of the landowners was from Florentia Street on the south side of the Fremont Bridge, as far north as North 39th Street. Outside of that area, beginning in 1888 other property owners rushed to have their land surveyed and laid out in lots to sell. A cluster of different landowners began naming their sites “Motorline” as they knew that there were plans for a streetcar line on what is now Woodland Park Avenue North.

A plat for a section of land from North 42nd to 45th Streets in Fremont was filed in November 1889 and named Third Motorline Addition. The property owners were two couples, Frank Harvey Winslow & his wife Mary, and John D. Smith & his wife Margaret. The two families may have become acquainted as neighbors, as both lived on West Garfield Street on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.

Frank Winslow’s life was a classic American story of westward migration. Born in Vermont, he’d lived a few years in Boston where he learned the mercantile business. In his mid-twenties in the year 1861, he went by ship to San Francisco and then to the Pacific Northwest. He found employment as a bookkeeper at the Port Discovery lumbermill in Jefferson County. In 1870 he became a customs inspector and in the 1880s he rose to become US Customs Inspector at Seattle.

Frank Winslow retired in 1889 and it appears that he planned to live from then on, from the profits of real estate investments in Seattle. The Winslows and Smiths combined their holdings to create this plat in Fremont; John D. Smith was a real estate agent in Seattle in the 1880s.

In early years, Seattle property owners were allowed to name the streets in their plat, anything they wanted. This caused streets to have different names along their course. On the right-hand side of this plat map we see that today’s Woodland Park Avenue had been named Motor Avenue. In the 1880s the street had several names, including Boman, for George Boman who lived in the 3500 block.

Finally in 1895 the City of Seattle decreed that the street system would have to be reorganized because there were too many streets with the same names. There was trouble when someone would call in a fire alarm, for example, to “Park Avenue” as there were quite a few. On this map we see that Park was renamed Winslow by the City process. Some names, such as Allen Place substituted for Vermont Street, did not have to do with this plat but was simply done to make the street consistent with adjacent plats of land. The designation of Motor Place was moved to the small segment of street between 42nd and 43rd Streets.

Sources:

Seattle street renaming process, Fremont street names.

Port Discovery Mill, Jefferson County, Washington.

Find A Grave: This free resource often has biographical info posted. You can read more here about the life of Frank Winslow.