Fremont in Seattle was developed in 1888 as a suburb with its own name. The success of Fremont was due to vigorous land developers, good planning, the availability of water transportation and the new rail line, the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern.
One of the developers of Fremont was Edward Corliss Kilbourne from Aurora, Illinois. He had been invited to come to Seattle by his uncle, Corliss P. Stone. Both men became developers of land on the north side of Lake Union. Both men were involved as investors in streetcar lines to bring buyers to see the residential areas which were opening up.
This blog article will tell of how C.P. Stone came to Seattle and became a civic activist and land developer.
From Aurora, Illinois, to Seattle in early years
We might say that Aurora, Illinois, is a “sister city” to the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle, because some men from Aurora were developers of Fremont in Seattle.
Aurora, Illinois, Historical Society
Aurora, Illinois, was a frontier town when two brothers, the McCartys, arrived in 1834 and set up a mill on the Fox River, about forty miles from Chicago. The brothers and their workers built new roadways and bridges, and they laid out a town with streets and lots. The town’s growth really took off in 1854 when railroads were put through.
So, too, Fremont in Seattle was formed as a separate suburb on a body of water, Lake Union. Fremont was planned in 1888 by enterprising developers who opened a lumber mill to create jobs and materials for housing. They laid out a townsite with streets and house lots. They knew that in 1888 a rail line, the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern, was being put through the Fremont property, parallel to today’s ship canal and North 34th Street. This would create an ideal industrial location for the lumber mill and other businesses to send their products to market by rail.
Corliss P. Stone (1838-1906) was an early businessman, real estate investor, and civic activist of Seattle. When he was about sixteen years old in 1854, his father James C. Stone moved the family from Vermont to Illinois. Via a letter from a relative, James Stone had been enticed to join the development of Aurora, Illinois, which was then considered to be on the frontier, Out West. Thirty years later, Corliss P. Stone would become a letter-writer who invited a relative, his nephew Edward Corliss Kilbourne, to come Out West to Seattle.
James C. Stone practiced medicine and was also a merchant who realized that the coming of the railroad in 1854 in Aurora, would make the city grow into a commercial center. He was already age 60 when he moved his family from Vermont to Aurora, Illinois. He lived to be 89 and was noted as a prominent, active member of the community. He had a hotel and a stagecoach business, which was how people would get to and from outlying areas into Aurora.
Along with the Stone family, two other families from Vermont, the Kilbournes and Crossmans, moved to Illinois. Corliss was the youngest of the Stone family’s three children. His two older sisters Frances Arabella Stone Kilbourne (Horatio) and Charlotte Stone Foster (Henry) also moved to Aurora.
Horatio Kilbourne set up a dental practice in Aurora and his brother Isaac Kilbourne went to Chicago to set up his dental practice, perhaps so that he and Horatio would not compete in Aurora. The census of 1880 showed the Isaac Kilbourne family in Chicago, with his wife Mary Jane Crossman Kilbourne, and a number of Crossman relatives living in the household.
Go West, young man
Corliss P. Stone mayoral portrait of 1872
As part of a family who had gone to Illinois which was then on the frontier, Corliss P. Stone may have been infected with the “go West” bug. As a young man in the 1860s he ventured to San Francisco to investigate the business climate, and then he came to the Pacific Northwest.
Stone worked for a time at Port Madison (north end of Bainbridge Island) which was the site of a lumber mill. He came to Seattle by or before 1865 and set up a general store. Stone married, and he & his wife had two sons.
Stone became involved in civic endeavors in Seattle such as trying to improve roads and transportation systems. He served on the town council, and he became mayor of Seattle in 1872-1873 at a time when the term of service was only one year. This was probably because the mayoral position was unpaid, and those in public office still had to support themselves with their own businesses.
Personal and business crises in 1873
By 1873 C.P. Stone had experienced a family crisis and a business downturn which made it look as though he might give up on Seattle and return to Aurora, Illinois. Stone and his wife split up; she took their two sons to live in Kitsap County.
Advertisement on April 5, 1873, in the Weekly Intelligencer newspaper.
Stone was in a business partnership with Charles Burnett, for a general store on Commercial Street (today’s First Avenue South.) Events seem to indicate that either the store was not successful, or that C.P. Stone wanted to end his business partnership. Stone resigned from the office of mayor in February 1873, short of finishing the one-year term, and by the next month he had left Seattle.
In March 1873 C.P. Stone went back to Aurora, Illinois. News from Seattle caught up with him as he was making his way across the country. The Seattle Weekly Intelligencer newspaper published an allegation that Stone had embezzled money from his business, and that Stone had left town with a married woman.
It is astounding that a newspaper would print such allegations without “fact-checking.” We don’t know for sure who provided the newspaper with this story. It may be that Stone’s business partner felt that he’d been left in the lurch. Their business, the general store, closed and there was a creditors meeting to divide the assets. An advertisement in the Weekly Intelligencer newspaper of April 5, 1873, told that the business was in the hands of a receiver.
The allegation of “running off with a married woman” which had appeared in the newspaper in March 1873, was not true. The father of the woman named in the news article, sent in a rebuttal to the newspaper stating that she was out of town but that it was nothing to do with C.P. Stone.
Local history researcher Casey McNerthney has looked for evidence of what really happened. He has posted the story on HistoryLink Essays #197 and #22980.
A retreat and a re-start
The commercial district of Seattle as photographed in 1878 by Peterson Studio.
Corliss P. Stone was away from Seattle for the next three or four years, and with all that he’d been through, including the reputation-destroying newspaper articles, we might assume he would never go back to Seattle. Perhaps Stone spent his time at home in Aurora, Illinois, working in one of the family businesses, since his father was a merchant.
Stone visited in Chicago, as well, where some friends & family members were living. His nephew Charles Kilbourne (son of Stone’s sister Frances) was living in the household of Isaac Kilbourne, Charles’ uncle. Members of the Crossman family, relatives of Isaac’s wife Mary Jane Crossman Kilbourne, were living in the household. In 1874 Corliss Stone married Elmira Crossman, someone he’d known since his youth, since the Crossman, Kilbourne and Stone families had all migrated from Vermont to Illinois.
It might have seemed likely that Corliss Stone and his new wife would settle down in Illinois amongst their extended families, but surprisingly they migrated back to Seattle by or before 1878. Stone re-entered the grocery & general store business in Seattle, and this time he was successful. By 1883, the same newspaper which had once printed false allegations against him, now began writing complimentary articles about Stone’s store as a “growing business” and an example of the vigorous commercial district of Seattle.
The influence of C.P. Stone on the growth of north Seattle
Edward C. Kilbourne
Stone’s influence caused his nephew, Edward Corliss Kilbourne (another one of the sons of C.P. Stone’s sister Frances), to come to Seattle in 1883 where Kilbourne became one of the developers of the Fremont neighborhood in 1888.
Edward C. Kilbourne, a dentist turned land investor, became a key person in the development of Fremont as the legal representative of the out-of-town investors, the Blewetts of Fremont, Nebraska.
Kilbourne enhanced and promoted the settlement of Fremont by creating transportation options, including ferry boats crossing Lake Union, and later with a streetcar line which went northward from downtown Seattle out along Westlake Avenue. In this era before cars came into use, Kilbourne and other Seattle developers built streetcar lines to bring people out to see the new housing areas.
The Edgewater plat at Stone Way.
Along with his nephew, C.P. Stone also gravitated to the north side of Lake Union in the 1880s where he became a land investor. In 1883 C.P. Stone went in with other investors to lay out streets and house lots in a plat called Lake Union Addition. This plat was at the south end of what is now called the Wallingford neighborhood, centered around Wallingford Avenue & Northlake Way.
In 1889 C.P. Stone went in together with William Ashworth & Milton Densmore to plat some land on the east side of what became Stone Way. William Ashworth’s property was at the present site of the North Transfer Station of Seattle Public Utilities, on North 34th Street just east of Stone Way.
Ashworth & Stone named their plat “Edgewater.” This was another mail stop on the railroad (present Burke-Gilman Trail.) Like Ross and Fremont which also had post offices along the line of the railroad, William Ashworth was the Edgewater postmaster who received the mail brought by rail.
In 1901 C.P. Stone filed a plat called C.P. Stone’s Home Addition. The southern line of the plat, marked here as Kilbourne Street, is now North 36th Street. The platted area was on both sides of Stone Way, and this year of 1901 was when Stone Way acquired its name.
C.P. Stone’s Home Addition’s platted area of streets and house lots extended from the Edgemont plat on the left (today’s Woodland Park Avenue) to Interlake Avenue on the right where it met the Lake Union Addition.
Multiple business involvements
His land development projects showed C.P. Stone that transportation was part of the success of a site. He became involved in commercial use of electricity & streetcar lines in Seattle.
One of C.P. Stone’s sons from his first marriage died of spinal meningitis at age 20 in 1890. His other son, Corliss L. Stone, is shown living with him in 1892 as per this Seattle City Directory listing.
Along with his nephew Edward Corliss Kilbourne, C.P. Stone became a real estate developer and investor in Seattle’s electric streetcar system. His later business associations showed that he’d overcome the damaging false allegations of 1873, and he was trusted by other businessmen in Seattle.
Seattle City Directory listings of 1892
When C. P. Stone died in 1906, the current mayor of Seattle and five former mayors were pallbearers at the funeral. We may wonder if Stone’s widow Elmira made this arrangement as a statement, showing honor to her husband who had served the City of Seattle not only in office as a mayor, but as a businessman who contributed to Seattle.
Today we remember Corliss P. Stone for the street names of Corliss Avenue and Stone Way. We may also consider him the “uncle” of the Fremont neighborhood since he invited his nephew, Edward Corliss Kilbourne, to come to Seattle, where Kilbourne was one of the developers of the Fremont neighborhood and of the Seattle streetcar system.
Sources:
The Fremont neighborhood in Seattle is located at the northwest corner of Lake Union. Map courtesy of HistoryLink.
For more on the life of Corliss P. Stone, see HistoryLink Essays #197 and #22980, and Essay #1251 about his nephew Edward C. Kilbourne. Kilbourne is credited with naming many of the streets in Fremont, including place names from Illinois such as Albion, Evanston and Aurora.
Post offices: article on this blog about the early post offices of Ross, Fremont, and Edgewater. See also “King County Post Office Chronology (1852-1905),” HistoryLink Essay #23388, by HistoryLink Staff, 2025.
Street names conversion table: Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside has lookup tables of old and new street names. Here is the list of street name changes as of 1895 for downtown Seattle. Another lookup table shows streets north of Lake Union such as Fremont. Putting in the name Kilbourne, for example, will show that the street name was changed to North 36th Street.
The Stone Way bridge in 1911, a temporary bridge during construction of the ship canal. Photo courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.
