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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 1, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 4, 2023

For first-of-its-kind Hiawatha Playfield, the trees are the keys

By Clay Eals

To my childish eyes in the 1950s, the swing set at West Seattle’s Hiawatha Playfield was the tallest in the world. As an adult, I enticed my daughter and nephews (and their kids) to the park with the same claim. For no matter your age, when you pump hard and swing high on those swings, you feel like you just might touch the nearby treetops.

This scenario fits the groundbreaking role that Hiawatha holds among Seattle parks. Though West Seattle had been annexed only four years prior, this squarish tract became, in 1911, the city’s first public place for indoor/outdoor recreation. The 11 acres comprised a fieldhouse for meetings and games, a ballfield and tennis courts for athletics, and paths and groves for respite and reflection.

Our “Then” photo was taken 50 days before the Jan. 5, 1912, opening of Hiawatha’s “sumptuous” fieldhouse, as described by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Some two-dozen trees dot an otherwise shorn and barren landscape. But as we see in our “Now” image, the foresight of the legendary Olmsted Brothers, Seattle’s early 20th-century park designers from the East, made possible a more lush fate, creating an Admiral neighborhood showcase.

One could lyrically surmise that its trees are the keys. Arthur Lee Jacobson, known as “Mr. Tree” for the 1989 and 2006 editions of his encyclopedic book “Trees of Seattle,” embraces Hiawatha because trees were integral to its conception, not “an incidental afterthought.”

The park’s scores of varieties include a majestic Red Oak (a “Heritage Tree,” says nonprofit PlantAmnesty) whose dimensions, measured anew by Jacobson, stretch 133 feet wide and 78 feet tall, with a trunk circumference of 15 feet, 8 inches. And it’s not even halfway toward a 250-year life expectancy.

Though Hiawatha provides many access points, its stairstep entry at the southeast corner of California Avenue and Lander Street offers an evergreen treat absent in 1911. It’s the comforting canopy of two robust, low-slung Lawson Cypress trees, imbuing visitors beneath them with an aura akin to photographer W. Eugene Smith’s famously forested tableau of two youngsters, “The Walk to Paradise Garden.”

The park, named by the late West Seattle philanthropist and park commissioner Ferdinand Schmitz for a precolonial Native American leader lionized by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, has hardly been static. Hiawatha’s fieldhouse — enlarged in 1949, rebranded as a community center in the 1970s and closed since 2020 — is slated for an upgrade, as are the park’s playground and its ballfield’s artificial turf.

The trees of Hiawatha, too, are ever-changing. Yet their sturdiest specimens keep beckoning a skyward gaze from the child in us all.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Karen O’Connor, Ken Bounds, Ya-Hui Foozer, Chris Eals, Frankie Foozer, Diane Venti and especially Arthur Lee Jacobson for their invaluable 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 a video interview of Arthur Lee Jacobson, 3 related documents, 9 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 21 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 May 25, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 28, 2023

The oft-rejected Montlake Bridge finally connected Seattle to a field of dreams

By Jean Sherrard

In the stirring 1989 blockbuster “Field of Dreams,” a 30-something farmer is driven to build a seemingly chimerical baseball venue in his cornfield.

A similar drive might have inspired Darwin Meisnest, the University of Washington’s youthful graduate manager (athletic director in today’s parlance) as he lobbied for a permanent crossing of the Montlake Cut, which divided the UW’s new stadium from points directly south.

The final — and easternmost — bascule (French for teeter-totter) intended to traverse the Lake Washington Ship Canal (1916) was, for Seattle voters, a bridge too far. They already had funded completion of the Ballard, Fremont and University bridges but repeatedly balked at $500,000 to span the Montlake Cut.

Meisnest (1896-1952, popularly known as “Dar”) already was instrumental in the 1920 erection of the UW’s majestic new outdoor bowl, today known as Husky Stadium. He opted to bend his shoulder to the Sisyphean task of bridge-building.

For the stadium’s inaugural football contest on Nov. 27, 1920, between Dartmouth and the UW, Meisnest installed a footbridge atop a row of barges that straddled the canal. Thousands of grateful south-side gridiron fans crossed over, packing just-christened Washington Field. (Dartmouth’s “Hanover horde” won, 28-7.)

Though teased by the temporary span, voters in 1921 continued to point thumbs down for the bascule.

An undaunted Meisnest then pulled out all stops, invoking school spirit. UW alums were encouraged to twist the arms of tight-fisted friends and neighbors. Throughout the city were posted dozens of printed signs bearing the slogan, “You have your bridge, let us have one, too!”

A twist of fate — unforeseen, or was it? — turned the tide.

Less than a week before a 1924 election in which a Montlake bond issue appeared on the ballot for the sixth time, the University Bridge malfunctioned, stranding thousands of unhappy motorists in a 20-block long traffic jam. Opined The Seattle Times, “Seattle should build the Montlake bridge now. Already it has been delayed too long.”

On May 8, voters finally and overwhelmingly agreed.

In little more than a year, the Montlake Bridge was completed, opening June 27, 1925. Its graceful Gothic design mirrored the architecture of the university, as well as the nearby stadium.

A hyperbolic Seattle Post-Intelligencer heralded its opening as an “epochal event” and a “milestone in the city’s forward march.” It singled out Meisnest (“not long out of his teens”) for his “mighty and untiring efforts,” even calling for a statue to be raised in his honor.

Not bad for the young booster who dreamt up a field and a bridge to reach it.

WEB EXTRAS

To see our narrated 360 degree video of the Montlake Cut, CLICK HERE.

Also, here is a one-minute video taken from the air on Feb. 27, 2021, focusing on the ASUW Shell House and Husky Stadium but that features the Montlake Bridge and Cut as part of the context:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 18, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 21, 2023

Eighty-year hub for workers gets new life as ‘Labour Temple’

By Clay Eals

One word can convey a lot.

“Temple,” for instance, summons a lofty image: a cathedral, chapel or place of worship. So it makes sense that when America’s passionate labor movement arose in the late 1800s, those who conceived centers for workers to support each other seized the term as their own.

The drive to establish Seattle’s first Labor Temple emerged at the 20th century’s dawn. “It Will Be Built,” promised the headline for a March 27, 1900, article in The Seattle Times, reporting on a rally the previous night at Armory Hall.

One speaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor J.G. Pyle, described the temple concept with a more universal word — home. “It means … companionship, sociability, advancement and rest after a day of toil, relief from all cares of work. With a home, you can act in harmony in a way that would otherwise be impossible.”

Five years later, on Labor Day 1905, a new, brick-veneered shrine to organized work opened at Sixth and University, where it served scores of unions for 37 years.

It gave way in 1942 to a larger, two-floor, art-deco/brick statement of solidity at First Avenue and Clay Street, in what is known today as Belltown.

A two-floor northern auditorium addition arrived in 1946, and the original structure gained a third floor in 1955. The temple’s exterior earned city landmark status in 2008, but a relentless scattering of blue-collar workers beyond the city’s perimeters and decades of deferred maintenance took a toll.

Fortunately, two entities came to the temple’s recent rescue. The Downtown Cornerstone Church is converting the auditorium addition to a 700-seat sanctuary. Meanwhile, a Queen Anne-based real-estate firm owned by spouses Chris & Angela Faul has transformed the heart of the edifice while retaining and enhancing as much of its historical character as possible.

Fresh from society’s rebound from COVID-19, the Fauls created a hub for a more individualized style of labor (“co-working” in today’s lingo), with varied offices, meeting rooms, event spaces and all manner of amenities. The 56 spaces are 40% occupied and expected to be full by year’s end.

One showcase is a huge interior courtyard that, along with a ground-level reading room, can accommodate 150 people.

Perhaps most charming, however, is the temple’s rebranding: the insertion of a single letter in its name. It’s now the Labour Temple, the “u” reflecting the building’s configuration and union roots.

The Fauls are proud to have embraced the niche of small-scale preservation projects (such as their Queen Anne Exchange residential venture) without what they call “high-rise ambitions.”

Of course, they call it a labour of love.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Chris & Angela Faul , Kenny Wilson, James Laing and automotive informant Bob Carney for their invaluable 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 5 additional photos, links to the building’s Seattle landmark designation document from 2008 and a labor-temple dissertation from 2014, and, in chronological order, 20 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 May 11, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 14, 2023

Fireproof ‘Cruel Castle’ rises on Profanity Hill after big blaze

By Jean Sherrard

In a popular Middle Eastern folktale, the magic words “Open Sesame” provide poor woodcutter Ali Baba entrée to a treasure-bedecked robber’s den.

After Seattle’s devastating June 6, 1889, fire, which burned nearly 30 downtown blocks, the incantation “fireproof” conjured access to a hopeful future. As smoke rose from the ashes, residents assembled in a surviving Armory unanimously voicing their intention to rebuild “in brick and stone.”

When precocious, if prickly, architect Willis Ritchie (1864-1931) arrived in the scorched city a month later, a few days shy of his 25th birthday, he shrewdly adopted “fireproof” as his watchword, opening doors to rich opportunities.

After taking an architectural correspondence course and apprenticeship in his teens, the cocksure Ritchie had designed banks, opera houses and courthouses throughout Kansas by his early 20s. Overseeing construction of the Wichita Federal Building supplied on-the-job training in the latest fire-resistant techniques.

It wasn’t long before the newly arrived fire-proofing architectural prodigy won over Seattle — and King County — planners.

By late summer, his designs for a new, flammable King County Courthouse were adopted, and construction soon commenced atop First Hill. Proclaimed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Nov. 3: “It will undoubtedly be the finest building of the kind on the coast.”

Local competitors were less enthusiastic. Decades later, noted architect John Parkinson disdainfully recalled Ritchie: “With his hard, slick looking face… [he was] someone we all despised, but he managed to get the public buildings.”

When the courthouse opened on June 6, 1891, precisely two years after the Great Fire, lawyers and clerks dismissed the structure as “The Gray Pile,” the “Tower of Despair” and the “Cruel Castle,” reached only by climbing “Profanity Hill.” Opined The Seattle Times, “[It] deserves its bad name… Struggling up a steep hill with armfuls of law books [is] not conducive to judicial dignity.”

The new courthouse, despite its graceless tower, became Ritchie’s calling card. Commissions for “fireproof” public buildings poured in, and his mostly Romanesque revival designs soon dotted the state. Port Townsend’s Jefferson County Courthouse (1891), Olympia’s Thurston County Courthouse (1892) and the Spokane County Courthouse (1895), modeled after France’s Loire Valley chateaux, all survive.

The King County Courthouse’s ungainly profile photobombed countless Seattle cityscape portraits for four decades. But on Jan. 8, 1931, the flammable pile was dynamited, making room for King County Hospital, now Harborview.

To quote column founder Paul Dorpat, “In the moment it might take an exhausted barrister to mouth a monosyllabic indecency, the old embarrassment was leveled.”

Nine days later, Willis Ritchie died without so much as a “Close Sesame” to mark his passing.

WEB EXTRAS

First, a link to our 360 video of this column.

Next, an edifying contribution from the inimitable Stephen Edwin Lundgren, longtime friend of the column:

The pile of standing rubble that was the old courthouse  had a magnificent 360 view which I once saw captured in a series of Frank Nowell photographs taken from the bell tower level (found in an estate sale salvage,  whereabouts now unknown but believed to be in good hands)

The former King County Courthouse wasn’t quite levelled in an eyeblink (it took a while to disassemble) when the structure was demolished in the early 1930s, and thefoundations remained, visible in aerial views of the site and causing nearly $100,000 in additional expenses to remove when the current South Viewpark Garage you have pictured, (apparently forgotten by the planners) when the garage and helipad were constructed in the late 1990s as the project architect once told me.  

The site was vacant during the Yesler Terrace housing era (surrounded by those buildings 1941-1964) until the west side of Yesler hill was regraded (yes, that’s the word) for the freeway cut), and used for a MASH chopper landing site at the beginning of the trauma hospital era in the 1970s, the ER entrance then still being on the back (west) side. 

You might not know that Yesler (southwest First Hill) was proposed to be more fully regraded in a secret 1929 Seattle City Council ordinance, which obviously didn’t happen. David Williams missed that one. 

Also, the King County supervisors, after a poll of Seattle Times readers, accepted their vote to name the new hospital HARBORVIEW, in a 1929 resolution. At its 1931 dedication it was referred to as “Harborview Hospital” (photograph is of the envisioned campus, rather than the center tower and nursing dorm, the rest not built until decades later). There was a brief consideration by trustees (still County appointed) to rename it simply “County Hospital” in late 1931 but that didn’t happen. 

Its current name is Harborview Medical Center, after the council suggested last decade that their ownership rights be more fully recognized, and the operator UW Medicine and owner King County, and MLK’s image were added to our logo.

The former late 20^th century  version of our logo, after the UW Medicine inception, with the center tower and cloud swoosh

or this reverse version: 

Also, if you ever do a column on the former 1910 public safety building (Yesler), note that the City Hospital there was merged into Harborview in 1931.  Per advise from the Municipal Archivist (Scott Cline) email of March 25 2015: 

According to records in the City Clerk’s Office, arrangements were made for Harborview to take over the City Hospital once the former was constructed. The transfer of operation must have taken place in March or April of 1931, as we have correspondence from the County in early April indicating the Harborview construction was finished and the transfer of operations complete. In addition, in June, the City transferred physical therapy equipment that had belonged to the City Hospital to Harborview for the consideration of one dollar.

Thanks, Stephen!

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 4, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 7, 2023

Will the rear pool of Seattle’s shrine to science become a meadow?

By Clay Eals

One of my indelible experiences as an 11-year-old at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair (yours, too, if you attended?) came on a mocked-up, old-time Western street inside the U.S. Science Pavilion.

The ruse was amusing but unsettling: Walking on a wooden ramp, I headed downhill. But adjacent storefronts slanted sharply forward, bending my mind to think I was climbing uphill.

This life-size optical illusion captivated local and international press. Even renowned British journalist and later TV host Alistair Cooke wrote that the exhibit produced “slight nausea” for visitors to the pavilion.

Inducing similar disorientation today is a plan hatched by the same elegant and beloved shrine to science, which, post-fair, was renamed the Pacific Science Center and is newly rebranded “PacSci.”

PacSci is posing scenarios to transform its rectangular rear pool, the one behind its 5 famous curved arches. Several preliminary schemes call for filling the 20,500-square-foot basin with — no illusion — a waterless meadow.

The rationale is to remedy massive water leaks plaguing PacSci’s 61-year-old pair of pools. “Patchwork” repairs cost $170,000 a year, and complete restoration would run a whopping $17 million, says Will Daugherty, PacSci president and CEO. The pools, he says, face “catastrophic failure.”

The meadow plan, he asserts, is grounded in respect for PacSci’s original architect, the late Minoru Yamasaki, and for Northwest-flavored science.

“We understand our responsibilities as stewards” for a “magical setting,” Daugherty says, and a replacement meadow could stopper a long-term financial drain while showcasing indigenous plantings. “Our community wants their science center to look to the future. Adding life to the courtyard will help us meet these community needs.”

A big hurdle is the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board, from which PacSci sought and received protective landmark status in 2009-10. In that context, PacSci holds prestige as one of only 5 structures among the city’s 400-plus official landmarks to have met all six of Seattle’s landmark criteria. Unsurprisingly, during a 100-minute PacSci briefing on Feb. 15, several landmarks-board members doubted they would approve meadow-izing the rear pool.

Nor are other preservationists keen on it. Eugenia Woo of Historic Seattle says the interplay of PacSci’s pools, buildings and arches is indispensable to its appeal. To plug the rear basin, she says, would be as preposterous as infilling the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in Washington D.C.

A meadow also could run afoul of already-disbursed state heritage capital grants that require PacSci to preserve its historic features, says Jay Baersten of the Washington State Historical Society. In addition, the plan has generated vigorous online debate.

We’ll see, but this is one plan that may end up all wet.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Grace Kim , Tracy Sawan, David Peterson, Eugenia Woo, Jay Baersten, Erin Doherty and Heather Pihl for their invaluable 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 links to 5 Seattle landmark nomination documents from 2010, links to 2 online news articles, 8 additional photos, and, in chronological order, 6 more 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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Here are links to pdfs of the complete 2010 nomination of Pacific Science Center for Seattle landmark designation:

• The text document from Feb. 26, 2010
• The revised document from July 2, 2010, with graphics
• The first graphics supplement
• The second graphics supplement
• The third graphics supplement

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Here are links to online stories in February 2023 on PacSci’s meadow proposal:

• Margo Vansynghel, Crosscut, Feb. 14, 2023
• Feliks Banel, KIRO/My Northwest, Feb. 17, 2023

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 27, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 30, 2023

Harvesting history, trivia – and a whole stable of animal phrases – from a pastoral photo of 1891 Renton

By Jean Sherrard

When historian Ron Edge forwarded this week’s picturesque portrait of the farm of Renton founder Erasmus Smithers (1830-1905), I melted into a sentimental puddle.

Like many Americans long removed from pastoral life, I still use its idioms, from “Hold your horses” and “stubborn as a mule” to “till the cows come home.” Also, I began life near this spot. So to complement our 1891 “Then” photo, I’m all in on making hay while the sun shines.

The young Smithers was lured from Virginia to the Northwest by the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. Upon arriving in 1852, he secured 160 acres near the confluence of the Black and Cedar rivers. Following the death of neighbor Henry Tobin, Smithers expeditiously married Tobin’s widow Diana in 1857. Their combined holdings totaled 480 acres, displacing the Duwamish village that had straddled the rivers for millennia.

Reputedly guided by Duwamish chief Jimmy Moses, Smithers discovered a seam of coal on a nearby hillside. Soliciting investment from a wealthy Port Blakely lumberman, Capt. William Renton, he founded the Renton Coal Mine, soon providing right-of-way for the nascent Seattle-Walla Walla Railroad. The site became a thriving rail hub, its huge bunker serving mines throughout the eastern foothills. A grateful Smithers deeded Moses a single acre on the Black River (dried-up today).

With mining partners, Smithers platted the town of Renton in 1875. His original grid of streets and avenues remains largely intact south of the Cedar River.

This spring, I met fraternal twins Lydia Della Rossa Delmore and Linda Della Rossa outside vast McLendon’s Hardware, near the farm site, on which, in 1945, Renton Hospital opened. It was where the three of us were born.

Aptly nicknamed the “wagon wheel” for its hub-and-spoke formation, the hospital was designed by Seattle architect George W. Stoddard (1896-1967), also noted for Seattle’s Memorial Stadium (1947) and Aqua Theater on Green Lake (1950).

While layers of concrete and box stores offer few links to the past, the Della Rossa sisters, peering over a seemingly endless parking lot, had a story to tell.

At 4 a.m. New Year’s Day 1953, the two were born to Eddie and Angelina Della Rossa. Aiding the family’s fortune, the Toni hair-products company — whose popular “Which twin has the Toni?” ad campaign had swept the country — awarded them $500 for producing the year’s first set of twins born in the United States.

In one shake of a lamb’s tail, the Della Rossas were living like pigs in clover. On that, you can bet the farm.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 video of this column, mosey on over here.

For a video interview with twins Lydia and Linda Della Rossa click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 20, 2023

To glimpse Seattle’s jazzy coffeehouse past, just enter The Door

By Clay Eals

Seattle’s coffeehouse craze can ground itself pre-Starbucks in the late-1950s rise of anti-materialistic beatniks and their yen for jazz and steamy espresso. Whether its New York and San Francisco hubs were showcased in national publications or Hollywoodized by Jack Lemmon’s bongo-playing in “Bell Book and Candle,” the nervy subculture took rapid hold in the nation’s psyche.

It caught Seattle-born Ben Laigo as a 23-year-old Army recruit at Fort Ord near Monterey. From there, he and buddies surveyed San Francisco’s startling North Beach scene. “It was,” he recalls, “a different kind of weekend, instead of getting drunk in a cocktail lounge.”

Raised in an enterprising Filipino family (his dad was a longtime Ivar’s chef), the O’Dea High School graduate and Frederick & Nelson window-dresser decided to import the espresso experience to his hometown. So Laigo and investors rented a downtown nook in June 1959 on Seventh Avenue between Stewart Street and Olive Way. Its name was the definition of hip: The Door.

He first booked folk music but quickly switched to jazz. “I was one of these wannabes,” Laigo, now 86, reflects. “I wanted to sit down and play the piano.” He settled for occasionally sitting in on bongo.

Open till midnight or 1 a.m. (3 a.m. Fridays), the no-alcohol eatery surpassed the beatnik niche, its crowds lining up to the now-razed Music Hall movie theater on Olive. Reflecting this, The Seattle Times’ Lenny Anderson was amused early on that when the music-loving Laigo asked a group of beatniks “several times for a little more quiet” and then to leave, one replied, “Time magazine says we belong in these places.”

In February 1962, as the Seattle World’s Fair neared, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer branded The Door “the largest late-hour espresso club in the state.”

The Door perhaps hit its zenith by sponsoring mid-fair concerts June 19-21, 1962, headlined by the legendary Dave Brubeck Quartet at the city’s Green Lake Aqua Theater. But proceeds came up “a little short,” reported columnist Emmett Watson. Laigo soon sold The Door, which continued through the late 1960s.

Befitting his given first name of Buenaventura, Laigo later embraced a multiplicity of ventures. He hosted at the Space Needle restaurant, ran the Norton Building-based Harbor Club (370 members) and even invented a Seattle-centered, Monopoly-style board game called Main Entrée that sold thousands of sets.

His persona was sealed from the start. As he told the P-I in January 1960:

“If you want to do something, get it out of your system and go do it. If you fail at that, start over and do something else. But keep doing.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ben Laigo for his invaluable 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 14 additional photos, a history of The Door by Ben Laigo (pdf file) and, in chronological order, 66 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.

BONUS: Scroll to the bottom for a special section on “Main Entree,” the board game invented by Ben Laigo!

WEB EXTRAS

Here is a special section focused on Main Entree,” the Seattle-based, Monopoly-styled board game that Ben Laigo invented in 1971. First is a video in which Laigo discusses the game with Donna Driver-Kummen, who received the game as a gift when it was released. Afterward, you will find scans and pdf files of all of the game’s elements. Click and click again to enlarge them. Enjoy!

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 13, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 16, 2023

A paved path around Lake Union honors a Duwamish chief and his beloved homeland

By Jean Sherrard

In May 1906, while his second wife, Tleebuleetsa lay dying in their Portage Bay cabin, John Cheshiahud honored her final wish. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, it was “that in her last days … she be surrounded by her kinsfolk … and the friends of her youth.”

Lake Union John, as Cheshiahud was known to his white neighbors, sent messengers throughout the Duwamish diaspora, and during three days of celebration and solemn farewell, family and friends came from the Port Madison, Puyallup and Muckleshoot reservations to pay last respects.

A Duwamish chief, Cheshiahud is noted for remaining in Seattle long after the influx of white immigrants. Born circa 1820, he came of age before the settlers’ arrival. In a 90-year life, he witnessed unimaginable change.

His close friendship with a prominent newcomer fueled his drive to remain on ancestral land near his birth village. A sympathetic David Denny (1832-1903) sold him five forested acres on Portage Bay for a dollar.

While hunting, fishing, trapping and occasionally serving as tour guide, Cheshiahud straddled two worlds, one on the verge of certain annihilation.

Given earlier encounters with white homesteaders, Cheshiahud may have anticipated coming troubles, having narrowly escaped execution by a lynch mob. Denny’s daughter, Abbie Denny-Lindsley, provided the harrowing details in a newspaper account decades later:

She wrote that in 1854, her father, with David “Doc” Maynard and Henry Yesler, discovered the remains of a murder victim in a shallow grave near Lake Union. Advanced decay prevented identification. “When the murder became known,” she wrote, “three young Indians were arrested and imprisoned … although no more guilty than the rest of their tribe.”

An angry mob gathered and hung two of the men. As they strung up the third, Sheriff Carson Boren arrived and ordered them to stop, but they refused. In response, “he cut the rope,” noted Denny-Lindsley (Boren’s niece), “just in time to save [Cheshiahud]’s life.”

Found innocent of any charges, Cheshiahud “never ceased to be grateful” to his rescuer, who happened to be the same person who initially detained him without cause. Leaders of the lynch mob also were tried, Denny-Lindsley wrote, but it “never amounted to anything.”

In summer 1906, distraught after Tleebuleetsa’s passing, Cheshiahud sold the last piece of his Lake Union land for a significant profit, making him one of the wealthiest Native Americans in Puget Sound. He joined his daughter Jennie Davis in Port Madison, where he remained until his death in 1910.

In his honor, Seattle Parks in 2008 opened Cheshiahud Loop, a paved path circumnavigating his beloved Lake Union.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video version of this column, head over here.

To boot, a couple of additional photos provide context and location. Thanks to Caleb and Rob Wilkinson for their inestimable help exploring Portage Bay by boat.

Abbie Denny-Lindsley’s 1906 account of the near lynching of Cheshiahud: