(click to enlarge photos)
This week’s feature may be the earliest surviving look into Ballard. Beyond that we know little about the photo’s intimate parts. We wonder who lived in any of the about thirty minimal structures that can be barely distinguished through the soft focus and smoke. The white vapors are most likely from stump fires. The photo’s focus may be the responsibility of the age of the print, the camera, or the person who held it. We don’t know the photographer’s name, nor are we certain of what the community was called at the time of the recording. However, “Farmdale” is scribbled on the flip side of the worn print I first studied.
Farmdale was Ballard’s first and short-lived name. In 1889 Ballard got its second name, Gilman Park, and the once forested acres that gently sloped south to the north shore of Salmon Bay were divided into hundreds of residential lots and a few larger ones for the factories that were soon strung along the Salmon Bay shoreline. Daniel Hunt Gilman was one of a quartet of robust capitalists who organized the ambitiously named West Coast Improvement Company to develop the site. The place was extraordinary fit for building a community for sawyers not farmers. Judge Thomas Burke,
another of the ruling quartet, was happy to give up his bucolic visions of gardens in Farmdale for factories. In four or five chop-chop years the mill town became “The Shingle Capitol of the World,” and more often than not it smelled like Cedar. With its 1890 incorporation, came the third try at naming, and the citizens chose Ballard. It was given in thanks for William Rankin Ballard the steamboat captain who before the railroad made it to Salmon Bay regularly delivered settlers and their needed supplies to its shores. Capt. Ballard was another of the company’s quartet.
Of the two waterways shining in the featured panorama at the (very) top, Salmon Bay is, of course, the nearer one. The other is Elliott Bay. The wide headland on the horizon is West Seattle. Right-of-center, its highest elevation is “High Point,” the top of Seattle. (The high point tanks were included last week in a Bradley snapshot taken from South Alki Beach. They appear on the horizon.) High Point is about 9 miles south of the Ballard waterfront and about 510 feet above it. Magnolia is on the right, and Queen Anne Hill on the left, with the lowland, Interbay, between them. Left-of-center, at the southwest corner of Queen Anne Hill, the old growth trees of Kinnear Park stand out – and up. For a formality of one dollar, its namesake sold Kinnear Park to Seattle in the fall of 1887, about the time of the featured photo.
Our featured photo is also printed on page 24 of the illustrated history “Passport To Ballard, The Centennial Story.” The caption there reads, “The Gilman Park community on Salmon Bay, on the eve of incorporation. This is one of the earliest known photographs of the community. Old notes identify the street as 22nd Avenue NW.” Jean and I think this likely. We choose NW 57th Street as the repeat for the graded path and planked boardwalk that runs – ca. 1889 – behind the surviving fir tree on the left.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, lads? TaTa Jean the same routine. We start with a few recent relevant links that Ron has pulled from the blog itself, and then add a few more that we have scanned for some reason or other from our old clippings. Some day soon we hope to find a phalanx of well-armed volunteers who will scan them all.
EDGE LINKS BELOW
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