In 1882-1883 George Boman split up with his second wife, Adelia, and started a new life in a house on the north shore of Lake Union, on what is now Woodland Park Avenue North near Stone Way. Those streets did not exist at that time and very few people lived in the area.

The Fremont neighborhood in Seattle is located at the northwest corner of Lake Union. Map courtesy of HistoryLink.
In 1888, the Fremont development was created, which caused increased prosperity for George Boman. His property was on the eastern edge/just outside of the official Fremont plat. Boman’s property increased in value because of its location which was made more convenient by the Fremont development. There were more people interested in buying house lots in the area of the new Fremont community.
Boman also owned farmland in Duvall, east King County, and he had gotten acquainted with the Selleck family of Cherry Creek Farm.
In November 1883 the entire Selleck family left the farm and came to live with Boman at his house on what he then called Boman Avenue (today’s Woodland Park Avenue North).
The Selleck family included John and his wife who were about sixty years old, their two adult children Edward and Mary, and Mary’s little boy, Ralph. A newspaper article noted the family’s move to Seattle. We may wonder who wrote the line that Mary would “rejoin her husband” in Seattle, as it soon became clear that she had no intention of doing so.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper of December 1883 noted the move of the Selleck family to Seattle.
It may be that the Sellecks were planning to buy Seattle property from George Boman or perhaps he had made a boarding arrangement with them since he was living alone, that he might take meals with the Selleck family and that they would help maintain his property. His house had been built as a duplex so it seems that he’d intended to have someone else live there, perhaps so that during the day when he was at work, someone was there on site.
This article is the third in a series about George Boman, a Civil War veteran. The first article is about his origins in Tennessee and his Civil War service. The second article begins with his arrival in Seattle in 1875. In this article we will see the activities of George Boman in Seattle in the 1880s. Throughout the 1880s, Boman prospered with real estate and business investments.
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