Category Archives: Immigrant heritage
Before There Was a Wedgwood Safeway: From Rural to Urban
The area around the NE 75th Street intersection in Wedgwood never had an organized scheme of development. As a result, people who came to live there in the 1920s saw startling changes over the years in everything from road grading … Continue reading
An Immigrant in Wedgwood: Gerda’s Story
Perry & Gerda Frumkin were among the young married couples who found a new home in northeast Seattle in the post-World-War-Two years of 1945 to 1965. Northeast Seattle was at that time a region where developer Albert Balch had acquired … Continue reading
Immigrants, Houses and Growth in Northeast Seattle
The growth of Seattle is the story of waves of immigrants responding to historic events and economic opportunities in the young city. This blog article is about people on 40th Ave NE around NE 70th Street in northeast Seattle in … Continue reading
Freedom in Fremont: An Early Gas Station in Seattle
In the early 1900s nationalist fervor built up in Europe until the tensions exploded into the First World War from 1914 to 1918. When Germany declared war on Russia, it set off power struggles within that country which ended Russia’s … Continue reading
Remembering Shearwater: Cynthia’s Story
The Wedgwood neighborhood is only a mile-and-a-half from the (former) Naval Air Station at 7400 Sand Point Way NE in Seattle. There was still so much available land in Wedgwood in the 1940s, so during World War Two a lot … Continue reading
The Fukano Family in Fremont
In Washington State in the year 1910, the census showed that one out of every four residents was foreign-born. Of the other three out of four, many were first-generation, born in the USA of immigrant parents, and having come to … Continue reading
Original Resources, Real History
Have you heard of Frederich Drumpf, a German immigrant who operated a restaurant in Seattle in the 1890s? Real historians use original documents and verify their sources, and in this essay by Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside, we see that getting … Continue reading
A Picardo Perspective
In the Spring of the year our thoughts turn to gardening.
Seattle’s Immigrant Photographer: Werner Lenggenhager
Werner Lenggenhager (1899-1988) was a Swiss immigrant who had lived in Australia and California before coming to Seattle in 1939 at age 40. A trip home to Switzerland in 1949 made Lenggenhager realize that historic buildings are not always valued … Continue reading
Wedgwood’s Immigrants: the Akahoshi Family
Census records of 1920 show that there were quite a few immigrants living in the northeast Seattle neighborhood of Wedgwood that year. Germans who built their own houses and settled in Wedgwood included John Herkenrath, Gustav Morris, and William Voss, … Continue reading
Wedgwood in Seattle History 