(click to enlarge photos)

This is the tower in which Seattle’s most prolific pioneer historian, Clarence Bagley, may have written his many-volume histories of Seattle and King County. I assume he used it so, for why else would such a writer-publisher-printer build such a tower with a full panorama of the city, if not for inspiration?   The Bagley mansion, designed by an eastern architect, was built in 1885 on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill on a block-sized lot now bordered by Second and Third Avenues North, and Aloha and Ward Streets.  One of the earliest homes on the Hill, and certainly the first oversized one, the mansion’s rooms had twelve-and-a-half foot tall ceilings, and a furnace and five fireplaces to warm them.  The tower was Clarence’s idea, and “he loved it.”  It was decorated with Bagley’s collection of rifles and muskets.

The big home was used for collecting and entertaining, perhaps as much as for raising a family of four daughters and one son. The Bagley library included what was at one time considered the largest collection of regional history. Clarence was generous with its uses, as when this newspaper, The Seattle Times, lost much of its library to a fire in 1913, he replaced its lost editions with his own. 

Clarence Bagley was sixteen-years-old when he and his parents arrived on the first wagon to roll into Seattle in 1860. With a few stops to visit friends along the way, the Bagleys’ jostled drive from Salem, Oregon, had taken fifteen days. Thomas Mercer’s wagon was the first to reach Seattle, in 1853, but he and his wagon had traveled from Steilacoom by boat. In 1852 the Bagleys and the Mercers had journeyed west together from their native Illinois. As part of a pioneer Oregon Trail wagon train, it took five months to reach Salem, Oregon.

On Christmas Eve 1865, Mercer’s youngest daughter, Alice, married Clarence in Seattle’s first church wedding. Friends since their childhood in Illinois, he was twenty-two and she seventeen. The Methodist church was white and so was the town, then under two feet of snow.  Their four daughters were married in the Queen Anne mansion’s front parlor with the bay window.  On Christmas Day in 1925 their children and friends filled the mansion for the celebration of the couple’s 60^th Anniversary.

Alice Mercer Bagley died in 1926, and “Pop” Clarence lived on in their mansion until 1938, when he, too, died after nearly a half-century in his tower.  The big home was torn down early in 1944 to make way for apartments.

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WEB EXTRAS

I’ll drop in a couple of alternate views of the apartment building on Aloha.

Anything to add, boys?

Sure Jean, while hoping your vacation south from Paris into the verdure of a Perigord summer with plenty of castles and vinyards for your pleasure and Berangere and her family and much of yours too, is being enjoyed with some prudence and sobriety at the bottom and belt line.   First, before moving on to Ron Edge’s links, we will answer your “extras” on the surviving apartment there at 2nd Ave. N. and Aloha Street with two of the same taken by Lawton Gowey in 1981.   Lawton, you know, lived nearby and he took his photos as repeats for the historical landmark – the Bagley Mansion – he knew and may have remembered from his adolescence living on the hill.  Then after the Edge Links we will keep to the neighborhood with a few more older features we’ve accumulated through the years and finish by leaving Queen Anne for a small portfolio of snapshots taken on Bagley Avenue  in Wallingford.

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EDGE LINKS – CLICK TO ENTER

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BAGLEY IN WALLINGFORD ca. 2008

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It’s the off to bed hour (aka nighty bears time), and so we will do one of our minimal proofs in the morning – late.