THEN: Arthur Denny named both Marion and James Streets for his invalid brother, James Marion Denny, who was too ill to accompany the “Denny Party” from Oregon to Puget Sound in 1851. (Courtesy, Gary Gaffner)NOW: The Colman Annex was razed for a parking lot in the 1970s, but the Colman Building survives with the four brick stories added to its brownstone base in 1909. The year the Marion Street pedestrian viaduct to Colman Dock was also added.
While none of the names for this team and the driver of this U.S. Post wagon are known, the intersection is. The view looks east-southeast on Marion Street and across Western Avenue, in about 1903, to a three-story stone structure advertising the Seattle Hardware Company. (The business was so prosperous that it required an 1100-page hard-bound catalog to cover its inventory.) James Colman built the rustic stone structure across narrow Post Alley from his Colman Building, and named it, perhaps predictably, the Colman Annex. The Puget Sound News Company, a retailer of stationary, books and periodicals, was the Annex’s first tenant. The hardware store soon followed, the tenant until 1906 when the Imperial Candy Company moved in after Seattle Hardware moved to its own new home at First Ave. S. and King Street. With its popular Societe Chocolates, Imperial became the Colman Annex’s most well-known and abiding tenant.
A detail selected from the 1884 Birdseye of Seattle to look down at the intersections of Front Street (First Ave.) and Marion (left w. “9” written on it at the original location of Arthur and Mary Denny’s cabin and so the community’s first post office.) and Colubmia, right. In 1884 the northwest corner of Marion and Front was grandly improved with the Frye Opera House, which kitty-korner the future site for the Colman Building was a long line of commercial sheds given a sometimes unifying front facade. From the bottom of this detail to two block east at Second Avenue, the 1889 fire consumed it all.An unidentified photographer has climbed a ruin on the west side of Front Street (First Ave.) to look north along the waterfront following the Great Fire of 1889. The already filled street ends on Columbia and Marion are evident just north or beyond the still somewhat standing ruins. Columbia street cuts thru the photograph left-right just above its its center. Upper-right stands the tower of the Stetson-Post Block, a subject recently covered here.
After the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, most of the streets between Yesler Way and Madison were extended east into Elliott Bay, as far as the fire’s dumped rubble would support them. Soon both Post Alley and Western Avenue were extended off-shore and between the streets on rows of pilings driven into the tideflats. More than pilings, heavy stone and/or brick structures like the Annex also needed a hard packing of earth for their foundations. Colman built his Annex from stone delivered around the Horn that was intended for a new central post office at Third and Union, but the stone was rejected as too soft for a government building. Colman got it cheap.
Central Post-Office at the southeast corner of Union Street and Third Avenue. This is the accepted Chuckanut sandstone, while the Colman Annex is made of the first stone ordered for the P.O., but then rejected by the Feds.
We’ll note that this “studio” location for a mail wagon’s portrait has a fine coincidence. Arthur Denny, the city’s first postmaster, built his family’s cabin two short blocks to the east of this intersection, at the northeast corner of First Avenue (originally Front Street) and Marion Street. It was also the first Post Office. The party of pioneers led by the Dennys, Bells and Borens had moved over from Alki Point early in 1852 to mark their claims. The first mail to arrive in Seattle came later that year by canoe from Olympia. Robert Moxlie, the mailman, may have paddled his dugout through this intersection. The future foot of Marion Street was a low point on the beach where it was easy to step ashore. When Arthur and David Denny’s parents later joined them from Oregon, they built their home at the southeast corner of Union Street and Third Avenue. In 1908 the new Post Office and Federal Building opened on that corner. It was made of nearby Chuckanut sandstone, apparently harder stuff than that salvaged by James Colman.
In this look east on Marion from Railroad Avenue, work on the Colman Annex (above the team) is still progressing. The Methodist spire stands at the southeast corner of Third Ave. and Marion Street. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]A clipping from Pacific: the Methodists at the southeast corner of Third and Marion. This Gothic head piece (for the corner) was built in the late 1880s and survived the 1889 fire, but not the regrade on Third Avenue, 1907.
The Polson Implement Hardware Company, far-right, prospered by facing the Great Northern Railroad’s tracks on Railroad Avenue, here out-of-frame. Established in 1892, Polson sent its farm machinery throughout the west by rail. By 1906, the year this rudimentary structure of corrugated iron was replaced with the brick building on the right in our “now,” Polson had moved south to another train-serviced warehouse on the tideflats.
Some of the Post-Office rolling stock that replaced the teams. (This first appeared in Pacific, Nov. 24, 2002)[Courtesy, Carol Gaffner]The mid-1880s Mail line leading into the pioneer P.O. on Mill Street (Yesler Way) between Post and Western.POST OFFICE ON COLUMBIA
[DISREGARD the video order DIRECTLY above. I’ve changed my box from the University District to Wallingford where it is Box 31636, which I must right down for I have had a hard time memorizing it. ]
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, history hucksters? Hubba-hubba-hubba Yes Jean, and once again Ron starts it by rolling out some relevant links. Please Click Them.
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To be continued sometimes on Sunday, March 8 . . .
THEN: When it was built in 1864 Charles and Mary Terry’s home was considered the finest in Seattle. (Courtesy Museum of History and Industry)NOW: The ornate home was razed early in the twentieth century, first for more business-friendly structures, and then in the early 1950s for the city’s Public Safety Building. This too was razed, and the “Civic Square” proposed to replace it abides now as a construction pit fenced behind fanciful walls at the sidewalk. The site waits upon financing for development as a “public-private” space.
Most likely the first “now and then” treatment this charming pioneer home received was in these pages seventy years ago on Sunday, November 10, 1944. The author, Margaret Pitcairn Strachan, chose the Charles and Mary Terry home as the fifteenth weekly subject of her yearlong series on “Early Day Mansions.” Strachan’s fifty-two well-packed and illustrated essays must be counted as one our richest resources for understanding Seattle’s history. In 1944 many of the mansions built by the community’s nabobs were still standing, and sometimes the original families were still living in them and willing to talk with the reporter. (We will attach the Strachan feature below. Click TWICE to enlarge for reading.)
In the Strachan feature the Terry home faced Third Avenue near its northeast corner with James Street. We can learn something about the family’s history – especially about Charles – from the journalist’s reveries that came upon her as she stepped into the “now” after opening the door to a café near the northeast corner of Third Avenue and James Street. She writes, “The Columbian Café is probably the place which is on the exact spot where the house stood. Sitting at the maroon-colored counter, facing the huge mirror which runs the length of the room and reflects the booths in the background, I listened to the clatter coming from the kitchen and watched the waitresses in their spotless white dresses, as they hurried back and forth over the red tile floor, serving busy Seattle citizens who were unaware that this spot was once the home of the man who named Alki Point, owned its first store, was the instigator of the University of Washington, foresaw a great future for this ‘town of Seattle’ and drafted its first ordinances.” (Next, we have attached an earlier photo of the Terry home before it was pivoted off of Third Avenue to face James Street. Below the home we have added a snap of the 3rd Avenue front door to the Public Safety Building, and below that two photo that include the Columbian Cafe that Strachan visited for her research and/or edification or nutrition. The two cafe photos are public works subjects and have their own captions with dates.)
The Terry Home on Third Avenue before its pivot for facing James Street.The Public Safety Building facing Third Ave. about a dozen years ago (since destroyed) where once the Terry home revealed its lavish facade to both the village and the bay.The Columbian Cafe is signed just above the photo’s center. The view looks south on Third Avenue from near Cherry Street. (Courtesy Municipal Archive)Looking north on a closed Third Avenue from James Street also on November 13, 1928 during some road work. The Columbian Cafe is far-right. (Courtesy Municipal Archive)An early 20th Century look up Third with the Webster and Stevens Studio photographer’s back toward James Street. Note the St.Elmo Hotel at the southeast corner of Third and Cherry, on the right. It served the fire fighters and citizens during the city’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889 when the hotel was nearly new.. You can find it as well in the 1928 photo above it. [Below, Ron has included a link to the feature we did on the above W&S photograph – (Courtesy, MOHAI)JEAN’S repeat from not so long ago.
By purchases and trades with pioneers Carson Boren and Doc David Maynard, the Terrys owned most of the business district and were the wealthiest couple in town. On the sweet side of their pioneer life, they opened Seattle’s first bakery in 1864, the year they also built this jolly home, the “ornament of the town.” In 1867 the couple ran a large advertisement in the Pacific Coast Directory, which read, in part, “C. C. TERRY, Seattle, W.T. wholesale and retail dealer in Groceries, Provisions, Cigars, etc., manufacturer of crackers and cakes of all kinds. Unlimited supply of Ship Bread constantly on hand at San Francisco prices.” Tragically, Charles died of tuberculosis, a mere thirty-nine years old, in 1867. On the day of his death his third daughter was born.
A Seattle Times announcement on Feb. 4, 1906 that the C.C. Terry house with its “peculiar Gothic design” was being demolished.
Sometime between the 1878 birdseye view drawing of Seattle and the 1883 Sanborn real estate map, the Terry home was pivoted 90-degrees counter-clockwise to face James Street. At the same time the house was moved one lot east of its corner with Second Avenue, which is where we see it in the featured photo at the top. The home’s second footprint holds on in the 1904 Sanborn but not in 1908. It was demolished in 1907.
The above three-stack of Sanborn map details date from, top-to-bottom, 1884, 1888 and 1893. The Terry home sits at the bottom of block 22, to the left or west of what would have been the alley, had one been encouraged. Note how the footprint changes for the home. In 1884 the sun room attachment to the home’s south side when it still faced Third Avenue has been removed for good. By 1888 the row houses at the northwest corner of Fourth Ave. and James have been added. We can see the most westerly corner of those in the top featured photo. Also in the 1888 Sanborn the Russell Hotel has been added to block 22’s northwest corner at the southeast corner of Third Avenue and Cherry Street. In the photographs shared above, the Russell has had a name change to Elmo.On the right side of this pair, the northeast quarter of C.D. Boren’s Block 32 has been cleared of all, including the C.C. Terry home, by the time this 1908 Baist Real Estate map was assembled. The row houses survive, however, at the northwest corner of James and 4th Avenue. In the detail, on the left, from the Baist map of 1912, the row is gone and the Terry home site filled with a rectangular shaped brick structure.The Public Safety Building took the block in 1951, one of downtown Seattle’s earliest Modern Buildings. Here looking southwest thru the intersection of Fourth Ave. and Cherry Street, the City County building looks back, on the left, and the Smith Tower looks or peeks down from above, upper-right. The number “6.” scrawled on the photo is not explained. (Courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive.)The bottom subject of this pair is the oldest surviving photograph of any part of Seattle. It is conventionally (and probably accurately too) dated 1859. It looks east towards First Hill over the Yesler home, on the left, at the northeast corner of Front Street (First Ave.) and James Street. The mid-1860s subject above it includes the ornate west facade of the Terry home at 3rd and James. Note that the timberline around Fifth Avenue is nearly the same between the two photographs. This suggests that at some point before 1859 the clearing of the forest in this earliest neighborhood stopped – for a spell.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, boys? Ron Edge begins by putting down a few links – often to the neighborhood. We’ll conclude with the oft-used couples portrait of Charles and Mary, and another full-page feature on their home by Lucille McDonald, once-upon-a-time, The Seattle Times principle reporter on regional heritage. Finally we will drop in a hide-and-seek in which the reader is encouraged to find the Terry home.
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Lucile McDonald Sept. 15, 1963 contribution to The Seattle Times. DOUBLE CLICK to Enlarge for Reading!The Norwegian photograph Anders Wilse too this wide shot of Seattle ca. 1899 during the few years he lived in Seattle. Can you find (part of) the Terry home here-in? Clue 1: The intersection of Jefferson Street and the alley between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is near the photograph’s bottom-right corner. Clue 2: The Yesler mansion, surrounded by Third, Fourth, James and Jefferson, is far left.
THEN: Local candy-maker A.W. Piper was celebrated here for his crème cakes and wedding cakes and also his cartoons. This sketch is of the 1882 lynching from the Maple trees beside Henry and Sara Yesler’s home on James Street. Piper’s bakery was nearby (Courtesy, MOHAI)NOW: Jean took his repeats looking across James Street from both the open roof of the “Sinking Ship Garage” and from one of its screen-protected windows. Although somewhat high, we chose the former
If you are inclined to write a history of Seattle then you must include the three bodies hanging here between two of Henry and Sara Yesler’s maples on the early afternoon of January 18, 1882. The trees were planted in 1859; and they appear first as saplings in the earliest extant photo of Seattle, which was recorded that year. By 1882, the shade trees were stout enough to lynch James Sullivan and William Howard from a stanchion prepared for them between two of the Maples.
Yesler’s home at the center with James Street to the right of it, typically dated 1860. The forest at the top encroaches on 5th Avenue.A year and a half after the lynching Henry and Sara Yesler pose in front of their home at the northeast corner of Front (First Ave.) and James Street on July 4, 1883. The hanging trees are on the right. [Courtesy;, Northwest Collection, U.W. Libraries.)Henry liked to whittle.
As ordered by the judge, the accused couple expected to be returned to jail when their preliminary trail in Yesler’s Hall at First Ave. and Cherry Street was completed. Instead the vigilantes in attendance covered Territorial Supreme Court Judge Roger Sherman Green with a hood, bound the guards, and dragged like the devil the doomed couple up the alley to James Street. There the leafless maples suddenly exposed their terrifying landscape to Sullivan and Howard. Soon after being violently pulled from court – in a few pounding heart beats – these two prime suspects of the daylight killing the day before of a young clerk named George B. Reynolds, were lifeless and their swinging corpses played with.
A map of Seattle in 1882 idealized by it’s real estate. (CLICK to ENLARGE)Watklin’s 1882 panorama of Seattle from Beacon Hill, as it is framed and explained on a page of Prosch’s picture album of pioneer Seattle preserved in the University of Washington’s Northwest Collection. Below is a detail pulled from this pan, which includes a fat red arrow indicating the location of the 1882 lynching.
During his 1882 visit to Seattle, Watkins also used the King Street Coal Wharf to record a panorama of what was by then the largest city in Washington Territory. In this one of the panels from his pan, the location of lynching is below the top of the pile driver stationed right-of-center. The entire pan is printed next.Most – perhaps all – of Watkin’s 1882 pan of Seattle and its waterfront, taken from the King Street Coal Wharf. [CLICK TO ENLARGE]Watkins was visiting from California. Peterson, the photographer of this look up the waterfront, also from the King Street coal wharf, had a studio in Seattle. Most of its was portrait work, but his art for cityscape was hereabouts the best of the time. This is tentatively dated ca. 1882. The wharf building commotion in the Watkin’s pan has as yet not begun. (Click to ENLARGE)
In a few minutes more, the by now hungry mob pulled from jail a third suspect, a “loafer” named Benjamin Paynes, who was accused of shooting a popular policeman named David Sires weeks before. For a while the hanging bodies of the three were raised and lowered over and over and in time to the mob’s chanting, “Heave Ho! Heave Ho!” Children who had climbed the trees to cut pieces of rope from the cooling bodies tied them to their suspenders or, for the girls, to the pigtails of their braided hair. It was, we are told, for “show and tell” in school.
In July, 1886 the Yesler’s moved up James Street to their mansion facing Third Avenue. It was sided at the corner with Jefferson by an orchard large enough for lots of apple sauce and branches for crimes and punishments, although none were used so. Sara died in 1887 and Henry in 1892.
Although there were several photographers in town, none of them took the opportunity to record – or expose – a lynching. Who would want such a photograph? Judging from the local popularity of these killings of accused killers, probably plenty. A few weeks following the stringing, Henry Yesler was quoted in Harpers Weekly, “That was the first fruit them trees ever bore, but it was the finest.” It was Seattle’s first really bad nation-wide publicity.
Right to left, Yesler, Gatzert and Maddocks, made a Christmas tradition out of carrying together greeting cards to their friends in town, and probably getting their fill of seasonal snaps in return. Below is a portrait of a younger Henry – a Henry who looks fit for wrestling with Puget Sound’s first steam saw mill.
In Andrew William Piper’s cartoon of the event, the easily identified Henry stands in the foreground busy with his favorite pastime: whittling wood. The cartoonist Piper was a popular confectioner who loved dancing and singing with his wife and eleven children. He was also a practical joker and the first socialist elected to the Seattle City Council. We don’t know if Piper also joined the local chorus of acclaim for the hangings. Judge Green more than objected. Once free of his hood, he rushed to the lynching and tried to cut the ropes, but failed.
On the far right of his cartoon, the cartoonist-confectionaire Piper has included the sign of the Chronicle, a newspaper located in the alley behind the Yesler back yard. It was up this alley that the victims were rushed to their lynching. Printed next is a transcript from an 1883 issue of the Chronicle, which describes a resplendent new saloon in the basement of the new Yesler-Leary Building at the northwest corner of Front (First Ave.) and Yesler Way and so also at the foot of James Street.
An excerpt from the August 23, 1883 issue of the Chronicle.The Yesler-Leary building at the northwest corner of Yesler and Front. Like the rest of the neighborhood, including the Yesler’s hanging trees, it was destroyed during the “Great Fire” of 1889.Twenty-six years later, the lynching block on James Street, between First and Second Avenues in 1908. The photo was recorded from the Collins Building on the southeast corner of Second Ave. and James Street. The Collins survives and well too. On the left is the northeast corner of the Seattle Hotel. It was destroyed in the early 1960s for the “Sinking Ship Garage.” The side below the Pioneer Building, right-of-center, where they lynching was done in 1882, is here crowded with locals and tourists in town for the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet. A few of the dreadnoughts can be seen in Elliott Bay.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean, and most of it, again, links to past features related to the place and/or the subject. Most of extras – if one takes the opportunity to click and read – will be the several links that Ron Edge will be soon putting up directly below this exposition. Then, after the links, we will probably continue on with a few more features – if we can find them tomorrow (Saturday) night when we get to them. We should add that we do not encourage lynching of any sort, or for that matter capital punishment. It is all cruel, pathetic and even useless. Yes – or No! – we do not agree with the wood whittler Henry Yeslers. We have imprisoned within quote marks our title “finest fruit” borrowed from him.
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NIGHTY-BEARS SKUFFLE
Again, we have reached that nighty-bears (copyright) moment before we are finished, this time with lynching-related extras. Until we return in the morning – or sometime tomorrow – to continue dressing our figures, here is a James Street related skirmish I photographed in the early 1980s. This, we hope, will momentarily satisfy the urges for sensational news we may have nurtured. The 1882 lynchings were a few feet behind me, a century earlier.
![[Courtesy, Carol Gaffner]](https://i0.wp.com/pauldorpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gn-us-post-vans-gnrr-depot-web.jpg?ssl=1)
