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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 28, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 31, 2022

Born of war, Woman’s Relief Corps fed nation’s ‘higher sphere’

By Clay Eals

One of my mentors — the late Elliott Couden, an open-housing advocate in the 1960s who 20 years later founded the Southwest Seattle Historical Society — once lamented that as a boy, he had to learn history by memorizing timelines keyed mostly to wars. “We didn’t get very much into what relation we as individuals have to this society,” he said.

He could have been reading the mind, and heart, of Richard Heisler. During the pandemic, the energetic equestrian artist and historian, 49, focused his research on the estimated 3,500 Civil War veterans and their families who migrated to King County near the turn of the 20th century. Heisler, of Bothell, has unearthed direct links between these vets and the rise of the town east of Lake Washington’s northern tip.

Nationally, starting in 1866, many of the war’s surviving Union soldiers formed the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) fraternal organization. In 1883, their wives, along with daughters and other descendants and supporters, began gathering in posts of an auxiliary, the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC).

The Bothell WRC post began in 1902, and 22 of its members (plus two discreetly positioned men) populate our “Then” photo from 1908. They pose outside the city’s 1893 William Hannan home, which stands today at Bothell Landing along the Sammamish River, a half-mile west of its original site. Pristinely restored, it houses the Bothell Historical Museum.

Bothell, the city, derives from a family by the same name. Heisler pointedly notes that the only graphic symbols on a Bothell Pioneer Cemetery monument for founder David Bothell (1820-1905) and his wife Mary Ann (1823-1907), parents of George, the city’s first mayor, are of the GAR for David and WRC for Mary Ann.

Other local luminaries had ties to the war’s Union forces and their abolitionist, Lincoln Republican ways of thinking, Heisler says. “We think it was all so distant,” he says, “but many veterans and their families came west and walked the streets all over this county.”

WRC posts produced patriotic Memorial Day observances, installed flags and monuments and even supported women’s suffrage. At an 1885 Seattle gathering, the GAR’s J.C. Haines saluted their role: “We welcome you because you have demonstrated that woman has a higher sphere than any that man can ever lay claim to — a sphere as broad as human sorrow, as lasting as humanity itself.”

Today, the WRC has receded locally, but it lives on in Heisler’s talks, including one set for 6 p.m. Aug. 3, at the Bothell Library, for the Bothell museum. “This is not an abstract thing,” he says. “These are people.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bill Woodward, Pat Pierce, Jill Keeney and especially Richard Heisler for their help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard‘s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are two additional photos, two videos and 22 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

 

 

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 21, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 24, 2022

‘Eight Arcs’ tableau signifies transformation on Alaskan Way

By Clay Eals

You can see it looking south along Alaskan Way, but only for a block and a half at street level starting at Pier 66 or atop the Bell Street overpass, and only on clear days. To me, it symbolizes a century of transformation for Seattle’s shore. It’s a tableau that I call the Eight Arcs.

In our “Now” photo, front to back, count ’em:

• The Seattle Great Wheel (2012).
• The twin roof ridges of Lumen Field (2002, originally Seahawks Stadium then Qwest Field).
• The four roof ridges of T-Mobile Park (1999, originally Safeco Field).
• The curved countenance of Mount Rainier (1 to 2 million years ago, originally Tahoma).

This pleasing juxtaposition serves both today’s saltwater tourists and the roadway’s recently arrived condominium dwellers. For them, it’s a place of play.

But little — besides the pointed Smith Tower (1914) in the distance — is the same when you zip back nearly 90 years to our “Then” scene, along what had long been named Railroad Avenue.

Taken on an overcast Friday, June 22, 1934, from the Lenora Street overpass (1930-1983), the photo reveals what we characterize as a working waterfront, with side-by-side wharves, rail tracks and a divided, wooden boulevard beneath which washed the tides of Elliott Bay.

With much of its former train traffic undergrounded in a nearby tunnel, and as cars used the timber trestle to bypass the upland business district, this byway spelled sporadic trouble. To wit, on Nov. 24, 1934, a car skidded on tracks near Lenora, plunged 15 feet through the center split and landed upside down in 3 feet of water. The stunned driver was unhurt.

Thankfully, progress on the route already was afoot. In this Depression decade, work had begun to pave the thoroughfare and close its gap, remove its above-ground electrical wiring and poles and, most important, construct a protective western seawall, finished in 1936.

Such enterprise inspired the city to give the water-hugging street a more relevant, elegant name. More than 9,000 ideas poured in, many invoking the expansive sobriquet of “Way.”

With a decision nigh on July 6, 1936, the leading contender was Pacific Way. However, in a nod to the role Seattle’s waterfront played in the late-1890s Klondike Gold Rush, as well as to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (the city’s first world’s fair), Alaska Way slipped in as the finish-line favorite.

To honor “the men and women who pioneered the territory,” councilman and former mayor Robert Harlin appended the letter “n.”

The result, Alaskan Way, still provides a touch of humanity along the road to today’s Eight Arcs.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ron Edge, Bob Carney , Gavin MacDougall and Mike Bergman for their help with this installment!

Below are two additional alternate images from our NOW view and 41 clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column. Among the clips are 20 exploring the fascinating process of renaming Railroad Avenue, plus 8 historical pieces by our column founder, Paul Dorpat!

 

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 14, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 17, 2022

A parade of community continuity thrives in tiny Fall City

By Clay Eals

Is anything so timeless and appealing as a parade? From musical to commercial, from patriotic to protesting (which in turn is patriotic), a parade engages countless participants and onlookers, encompassing every age, setting, group and cause. All you need is two feet — or wheels — and the willingness to move.

Parades happen so often that movie characters on the run momentarily evade capture by joining one. In 1984, I saw a local political candidate become so entranced by a parade’s effect that after one cruise along the route he circled back to the end of the line and motored through again.

There’s just something innate that draws us together in person, what I’ve learned to label the Original Social Media: Face to Face. Especially in a neighborhood or small town, a parade embodies this, weaving a powerful spell. Seemingly everyone sees everyone, breathes the same air and exchanges smiles and waves.

And this summer, after a two-year pandemic hiatus, parades are back all over the county. One of the earliest took place June 11 in Fall City, the unincorporated burg 25 miles east of Seattle. The route, on Redmond-Fall City Road paralleling the Snoqualmie River, has served the tiny town’s annual processions since the post-World War II early 1950s.

Greater gatherings surrounded the parades, of course. Initially, the event was called the Strawberry Festival before morphing into Fall City Derby Day, saluting a Cub Scouts soap-box race and showcasing Derby Darlings atop a float. (One year, in 1968, the parade gave way to a River Drift, in which a 35-gallon metal barrel was dropped into the Snoqualmie, and citizens guessed how long it would take for the barrel to float 3.2 miles to a finish line.)

A new name emerged in 1971: Fall City Days and Logging Show. This year’s post-virus rebound was simply Fall City Day, celebrating 150 years since establishment of the hamlet’s first post office. Accoutrements included the traditional dunk tank and watermelon-eating contest.

One sign of community continuity along the parade route is a building at 337^th Place Southeast whose legacy stretches to the late 1880s, when it began life as a hotel and restaurant. Over the decades, its name, functions and roofline have changed, but it has stood as a parade touchpoint, next to the reviewing stand.

The Fall City Historical Society’s history books have tracked those incarnations faithfully, thanks in no small part to the group’s longtime director, the vigilant Ruth Pickering, this year’s parade grand marshal. “Rural towns are an important thing,” she maintains. “They’re kind of an endangered species.”

Unlike, thank goodness, their parades!

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bob Carney, Emily and Bruce Howard and Ruth Pickering for their help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are four documents from the Fall City Historical Society, an offbeat historical blurb from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), and three sets of additional photos that augment this column.

Parades R us!

In three groups, here are 93 additional photos (click twice on each one to enlarge it):

• 15 photos from the Memorial Stadium endpoint of the 1965 Seafair Torchlight Parade, by Katherine Drazic, courtesy of Teresa Anderson.
• 30 photos from the June 11, 2022, Fall City parade by Jean Sherrard. Click twice on each photo to enlarge it.
• 48 from the 1956 Fall City parade by Larry Divers and courtesy of the Fall City Historical Society.

 

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(Published in The Seattle Times online on July 7, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the print Times on July 10, 2022)

A Saloonkeeper’s civic sensibility inspired a lasting auditorium
By Jean Sherrard

James Osborne may have attended late 19th-century touring opera performances at Yesler’s Hall at First and Cherry, only blocks away from his profitable Gem Saloon in Pioneer Square.

And while tapping his foot to the music of Donizetti, Bellini or Verdi, the confirmed bachelor might have conjured an act of civic generosity that ended up supporting arias in centuries to come.

Affectionately referred to by friends as “a great infidel” due to his free-thinker’s rejection of religion, Osborne (1834-1881) bequeathed a whopping $20,000 to Seattle with one condition: The donation could be used only to build “a public hall” with city matching funds.

Nearly five decades passed before Osborne’s bequest was fulfilled. The site was a fertile stretch of glacier-carved swale between Queen Anne Hill and regraded Denny Hill.

Dotted by willows and edged with wetlands, this was a traditional gathering place for the Duwamish, who called it Baba’kwob or “the prairies.” The skillful netting of ducks scared up from Lake Union provided ample protein for potlatches and other tribal festivities.

The land also proved ideal for growing fruit, vegetables and imported roses. Settlers David and Louisa Boren Denny moved there in 1854 with their young family, building a log farmhouse and planting gardens that supplied much of Seattle’s fresh produce for the next quarter century.

In 1886, the Dennys — by then one of the region’s richest families — had donated much of the site to the city, prescribing, with an echo of Osborne, that it be reserved for “public use forever.”

By 1927, Osborne’s invested legacy had grown to $110,000, but repeated efforts to erect a public facility had languished or been thwarted despite popular acclaim.

That year, The Seattle Times lobbied for a civic structure to reflect a reinvigorated “Seattle Spirit.” Added the Post-Intelligencer: Seattle was “the only great Pacific Coast city without … a large municipal auditorium.”

City council members and Seattle’s first female mayor, Bertha Landes, offered vigorous support, proposing a $900,000 bond to fund construction.

However, passage required a turnout of at least 50% of eligible voters, and the March 8, 1927, election became a nailbiter. A Times banner warned on the afternoon of election day: “Light Vote Endangers Auditorium.” But Seattleites heeded the call, passing the proposition.

The 7,700-seat Civic Auditorium was completed by June 1928 and hosted its inaugural event, a national Kiwanis convention.

In 1962, the auditorium was refashioned for the Seattle World’s Fair as the Seattle Opera House. In 2003, with donations and public funding, the structure was largely rebuilt, with improved acoustics and seating, as Marion Oliver McCaw Hall.

WEB EXTRAS

Go for it! Click on through to our 360 video, shot on location and narrated by Jean.

Also Clay reminded me of the centerfold of our 2018 book ‘Seattle Now & Then: The Historic Hundred” which features a spectacular view of the Civic Auditorium from Queen Anne! It’s quite wide, so double click for full impact.

Also, we include a few celebratory photos of the Northwest Folklife Festival, marking its return after a two-year pandemic caesura.

Just for fun, check out the  jam session on the steps of McCaw Hall featured in our “now” photograph.