(click to enlarge photos)

When portraits of classes or entire student bodies became increasingly commonplace in the 1880s, a variation arose that required more work in the darkroom.  Some professionals offered a montage presentation in which the group portrait included, most often in a corner of the photograph or at other times stretched across the sky, a portrait of the school as well. (An example of such a montage with a pan is attached at the bottom of the blog.)  Our corner example in the week’s featured photo was recorded by one of the best photographers to have ever worked in Seattle, Anders Beer Wilse.

The nineteen-year-old Norwegian emigrated to the U.S. in 1884, first working with the United States Geological Survey, much of it in the mountains of the Northwest.  In 1897, the first year of the Yukon Gold Rush, Wilse did not ship north but instead opened his studio in Seattle. He was soon garnering prestigious jobs, such as photographing the construction of Seattle’s community water system that delivered fresh water to the city from the Cedar River.

The 1908 BAIST MAP detail above shows St. Francis Hall in purple-red, upper-right, with its last name “Woodman Hall.”   Across Spring Street from Providence Hospital it was also one block east of the then new Seattle Public Library.   In the 1912 BAIST MAP detail below the hall is gone, a victim of upheaval connected with street regrades on Spring Street and 6th Avenue.  

For this week’s feature, Wilse’s Seattle contacts took him to Rev. F.X. Prefontaine’s St. Francis Hall.  For the group shot, the photographer stood on the unpaved Spring Street a half-block west of Sixth Avenue.  That the students are generally divided by gender may be by Wilse’s or the teacher’s direction, or by the students’ own proclivity for herding.  The portrait is inscribed “class St. Francis School Seattle, Jan. 11, 1900.” The adult on the porch may be Elsie, which the 1901 Polk City Directory names the school’s teacher.

Francis Prefontaine was Seattle’s first Roman Catholic priest.  With aid of both parishioners and protestants, in 1870 he built Our Lady of Good Help, the city’s first Catholic Church. (In 2017 we featured Our Lady twice in PacificNW, on March 12 and 19.) The gregarious priest built St. Francis Hall in 1890-91 and named it for the Italian saint known for his loving sermons to ‘all creatures great and small.’  That the original Seattle priest’s first name was also Francis may be considered a cheerful coincidence.

As a secular priest, Prefontaine was not required to make a vow of poverty.  His uses of St. Francis Hall were diverse, and for a time in the late 1890s he lived there with his niece Maria Rose Pauze, who both edified and entertained her uncle with her piano playing.  She described him as “one to acquire property, clean it up and make a go of it.”  Other groups who rented the Hall from the priest were the Knights of Columbus, Professor Ourat (from Florence) with his dancing academy, dancing parties sponsored by the Adante Non Troppo Club, and late in the Hall’s life a fraternity, Woodmen of the World, who arranged to attach their name to the brick landmark.  One of the Hall’s last engagements is reviewed in The Times for March 10, 1908: “Knights of Columbus Make Merry at Woodmen of the World Hall . . . The crowd that attended taxed the capacity of the place.”  St. Francis Hall did not survive the nearly twenty-foot cuts that came with the 1909 Spring Street Regrade.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, mortals?  We welcome Jean back from his adventures in South California so near the variously scorned, beloved and broken border.

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DENNY SCHOOL CLASS (one of them) POSING IN PORTRAIT ON SCHOOL STEPS IN MONTAGE WITH SCHOOLS FRONT NORTH FACADE on the northeast corner of BATTERY and FIFTH AVENUE.