The Fremont neighborhood in Seattle was opened in something like a land rush in the summer of 1888 when lots were first offered for sale. The original land area of the plat was from Florentia Street on the south side of the Fremont Bridge, as far north as North 39th Street.
Outside of that area originally set out as “Fremont,” beginning in 1888 other property owners rushed to have their land surveyed and laid out in lots to sell. They hoped to gain sales benefit from the coming of more people to settle on the north side of Lake Union with convenient shopping and transportation in Fremont. Several plat filers adjacent to Fremont, gave the name “Motor Line” to their land developments, as they knew that there were plans for a streetcar line on what is now Woodland Park Avenue North.
A plat for a section of land from North 42nd to 45th Streets in Fremont was filed in November 1889 and named Third Motor Line Addition. The property owners were two couples, Frank Harvey Winslow & his wife Mary, and John D. Smith & his wife Margaret. The two families may have become acquainted as neighbors, as both lived on West Garfield Street on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.
Fremont’s early developers coordinated with developers of Green Lake and Woodland Park to extend streetcar lines. The name, Woodland Park Avenue indicated a streetcar to Guy Phinney’s private zoo, shown here in 1891. Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives Item 30713.
Frank Winslow comes to Seattle
Frank Winslow’s life was a classic American story of westward migration. Born in Vermont in 1834, he’d lived a few years in Boston where he learned the mercantile business.
In his mid-twenties in the year 1861, Frank Winslow went by ship to San Francisco and then to the Pacific Northwest. He found employment as a bookkeeper at the Port Discovery lumbermill in Jefferson County. In 1870 he became a customs inspector and in the 1880s he rose to become US Customs Inspector at Seattle.
Frank Winslow retired in 1889, and it appears that he planned to live from then on, from the profits of real estate investments in Seattle. The Winslows and Smiths combined their holdings to create this plat in Fremont; John D. Smith was a real estate agent in Seattle in the 1880s.
Street names in a plat of land
In early years, Seattle property owners were allowed to name the streets in their plat, anything they wanted. This caused streets to have different names along their course, because the owner of an adjacent plat might give their segment of the street, a different name.
On the right margin of this November 1889 plat map we see that today’s Woodland Park Avenue had at first been named Motor Avenue, between North 42nd to 45th Streets. In the 1880s the street had several names, including Boman, for George Boman who lived in the 3500 block.
Reorganizing Seattle’s street system beginning in 1895
Finally in 1895 the City of Seattle decreed that the street system would have to be reorganized because there were too many streets with the same names. There was trouble when someone would call in a fire alarm, for example, to “Park Avenue” as there were several. On this map we see that Park was renamed Winslow by the City process.
The designation of Motor Place written on the right margin of this plat map, was moved to the small segment of street between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Someone in the City Engineering Department did the re-assignment of street names and Winslow is one example of creating a street name which recognized the plat filer.
Sources:
Seattle street renaming process beginning in 1895. A humorous newspaper article attributed the renamings to City Engineer R.H. Thomson.
Seattle street renaming process as applied to Fremont street names.
Port Discovery Mill, Jefferson County, Washington.
Find A Grave: This free resource often has biographical info posted. You can read more here about the life of Frank Winslow.
