The original land plat of Fremont extended as far as North 39th Street. North of that street, other investors filed land plats with layouts of streets and house lots to get in on the growth of real estate values.
A corner store in Sunset Heights, built 1912, is today’s Lighthouse Roasters.
In 1889 two Norwegian couples filed a plat which they called Sunset Heights, on the hill between North 42nd to 45th Streets, with Phinney Avenue as its centerline. We can still see the early development of Sunset Heights with corner stores located along the route of the streetcar line on Phinney Avenue.
This blog article will tell the story of the two Norwegian couples who named their real estate investment Sunset Heights. These immigrants met both prosperity and disaster in the struggle to achieve the American Dream.
In 1871 in Norway, 21-year-old Oline Anrud married Hans Onsum, and the couple set out to start new lives in America. They touched down briefly in Wisconsin before continuing their westward journey to Seattle in Washington Territory.
In the 1870s and 1880s the couple spent some time in Seattle, where Hans had a meat market, and some time in rural Snohomish County. Perhaps Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889, made the couple decide that they would settle in the city where explosive population growth post-Fire, created the best economic opportunities. The Onsum family with their four children settled in a home on “Madison Heights,” on the hill above downtown Seattle.
In 1883 Oline’s younger brother Ole Anrud followed the Onsums to the USA with the same pattern of stopping in Wisconsin before arriving in Seattle. Ole Anrud worked as a watchmaker until, in 1887, he could afford to get married. He returned to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for the wedding. By June 1887, Ole and his bride, Mathilde, were living in Woodinville near Seattle, as recorded by territorial census enumerator Ira Woodin.
The Sunset Heights real estate investment
In 1888 Fremont’s developers began sales of lots at about the present site of the Fremont Bridge. Photo courtesy of UW Special Collections, Asahel Curtis Item 482.
In 1889 the two couples, Hans & Oline Onsum and Ole & Mathilde Anrud, went in together on a real estate investment on the growing edge of a new community, Fremont. Fremont, located north of Seattle’s Queen Anne hill, had been set out as the Denny & Hoyt’s plat in 1888 with lots marked out for houses and businesses.
Fremont had been organized with a separate name like a suburb, because it was outside of the Seattle City Limits at that time. Fremont’s total land area was about 212 acres, reaching from Florentia Street on the south side of Ross Creek (today’s ship canal) up to today’s North 39th Street, with the intersection of North 34th Street & Fremont Avenue as the main business district of the community.
The Anrud & Onsums’ plat was on undeveloped land on the north side of Fremont from 42nd to 45th Streets. Their plat, which they named Sunset Heights, was on a high elevation with good views, and with Phinney Avenue at its centerline. The Anruds & Onsums did not live in Sunset Heights themselves; it seems that it was a real estate investment where they intended to derive income from selling lots.
The original plat map of Sunset Heights is turned so that north, is on the right. The original street names given by the Anrud & Onsums have been changed.
As of the plat filing in 1889, property owners could give the streets in their plat, any names that they chose. The map (turned with north at the right) shows that today’s Phinney Avenue was first called Onsum Avenue, and today’s Francis Avenue was called Anrud.
City Engineer R.H. Thomson straightened out Seattle’s street system in 1895.
The engineer who surveyed to lay out and measure the lots in Sunset Heights was R.H. Thomson, later to become famous for his plan to flatten the hills of Seattle. The Sunset Heights plat document was notarized by Percy Rochester, an attorney specializing in real estate along with his business partner George Boman, a real estate investor, who was himself a resident of the Fremont area.
The Sunset Heights plat was filed with King County on May 6, 1889, and the timing could not have been better. Just thirty days later, Seattle’s Great Fire knocked down quite a few blocks of the downtown business district, and the Fire resulted in a do-over and an economic boom. People streamed into Seattle to get in on the rebuilding of the city, and these people needed places to live. In the year following the Fire, more than 400 plats were filed in King County, and property investors like the Onsums & Anruds were able to sell lots for houses.
From prosperity to devastation
As of 1890, the Onsum and Anrud families seemed settled and prosperous in Seattle. But within the next ten years, both Hans Onsum and Ole Anrud would die, and their widows would be left to find financial resources to finish raising their children.
At age 42 in 1897, Ole Anrud was bitten by Gold Fever, or perhaps by a desire to see if there would be good investment opportunities in the Yukon. In June 1898 Ole set out on a small freight steamer, which was swamped in turbulent waters at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska. Ole Anrud was one of the eighteen people on board, who all drowned.
A Wisconsin newspaper reported the 1898 death of Ole Anrud in Alaska.
Less than six months later, in January 1899 in Seattle Hans Onsum, age 54, succumbed to health problems.
Hans & Oline Onsum family circa 1890
The two widows, Oline Onsum with her four children, and Mathilde Anrud with three children, all under age 21, had to find a way to support their families. Real estate transactions recorded in Seattle newspapers showed that they still did derive some income by selling lots in Sunset Heights.
By the year 1900, Oline Onsum had opened her house in Seattle to boarders as a source of income. Mathilde Anrud took a different route; she returned to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to live with relatives.
By the year 1910, Mathilde Anrud’s oldest two children, ages 21 and 17, were working as stenographers for the railroad in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Eventually all three of Mathilde’s children, Mildred, Arthur and Helen, returned to live in the Pacific Northwest where they married and pursued their careers. Mathilde, who stayed in Wisconsin, died unexpectedly at age 74 in 1938 while on a visit to her daughter Helen, in Blaine, Washington.
Oline Onsum and her children stayed in Seattle, where all four married and found careers. Oline died at age 77 in 1927.
We have the Sunset Heights plat in Fremont to remember the story of these two Norwegian-immigrant families and the impact of historical events, including the founding of the Fremont neighborhood, the Seattle Fire and the Yukon Gold Rush.
Sources:
Ole Anrud 1855-1898
Alaska Shipwrecks: alaskashipwreck.com The Jessie, a 65-ton small freight steamer, was lost at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River on June 28, 1898, swamped in turbulent waters. The captain was J.T. Murphy of Bowling Green, Kentucky. The captain and seventeen passengers all drowned, including Ole Anrud of Seattle. Source: H.W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest (1966), page 42.
Genealogical resources including census; newspaper search; and Find A Grave.
Plat maps: King County Parcel Viewer shows the legal description of each house including plat name, and on the right margin of the page is a link to the plat map.
Sorting out Seattle street names: Beginning in 1895, Seattle began to change street names so that there would only be one name for a street along its entire length, and only one street with any given name. “Lake,” for example, was used in several places around the city and was the original name of Fremont Avenue. Several more streets in Fremont had their names changed again in the early 1900s. Here is a list in the newspaper in 1901, of some changes including Onsum & Anrud Avenues.
