(click to enlarge photos)
Here stands historian Fred Brown holding his new book and farmer Jess Jensen holding the roped reins attached to his four cows. The two-legged animals pose near one another and the intersection of NW 58th Street and 8th Avenue NW, although across about a century of time. Before Ballard’s 1907 annexation into Seattle, 58th was named Times Street (not knowing other or better, I propose that it was named for this newspaper). Resting comfortably at the base of Phinney ridge, Eighth Avenue, then called Division Street, served as Ballard’s eastern border.
Jesse and Kjerstine Jensen were Danish immigrants who built their home in Ballard in the 1890s. Like most of Ballard’s first flood of citizens, Jesse easily found hard but sustaining work with a lumber mill on Salmon Bay. He signed on with one of the largest, the Ballard Stimson Mill. Soon, however, the couple built their Ballard farm, raising primarily chickens, pigs and cows. Kjerstine handled the business of the farm. The milk was both sterile and popular, selling at a nickel a quart. Anna, the couple’s daughter, recalled “My mother sold quite a lots of chickens, young fryers. They’d come and get them and she’d kill them (the chickens) right while they (the customers) were there (waiting).”
If Fred and Jesse could have bridged the century here at the corner, the historian might have first asked the farmer for the names of his cows. Surely they all had them. While paging through his book and pausing at page 58 where this snapshot of Jensen and his bovine quartet is printed, the historian Brown would not have missed the chance for asking the builder-farmer for the photo’s date. Perhaps it was 1907 or soon after. One of the first freedoms lost that year with Ballard’s annexation into Seattle was a cow’s liberty to wander the neighborhood. Here Jesse has his milch cows roped. Perhaps they are regulated, posing together not in Ballard but in Seattle. Whichever. Brown notes that the Eighth Avenue in the snapshot is still more an inviting pasture for the couple’s cows than a paved arterial.
Brown clarifies the telling title of his book, The City is More Than Human, with a subtitle, An Animal History of Seattle. For now, I cannot think of a good analogy for his history except to note that once you have read The City Is More Than Human, you may feel that you have been talking with its subjects: beavers, cougars, cattle, cows, horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens and salmon.
If you have pets, children with pets, back yard chickens (properly cared for, they are allowed), or an active good will for animals, you may well want to read this book. Author Brown suggests that it may both help you “see how animals fit into history” and also spur you to “consider how to live amongst animals today.” (To note its own pedigree, Brown’s book is published by the University of Washington Press with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment.)
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, dawgs? YUP JEAN links galore or more of the same, we mean features, old and not-so-old that touch on this week’s subject and its Ballard home.
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MISC-INTERSPECIES ILLUSTRATED
