Category Archives: Seattle History
Annexed Cities
One of the most common questions I receive on my blog is about the Seattle City Limits and on what date different areas came into the city. Some neighborhoods of Seattle such as Ballard and Ravenna started out as separate … Continue reading
Seattleness
Did you know that Seattle residents live under 240 days of gray skies per year? The cover illustration of this wonderful book, Seattleness, is a histogram featuring color samples from the Seattle sky measured over a year’s time and laid … Continue reading
Seattle Street Names North of Lake Union
Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside has previously cataloged the street names which were reorganized in a major City ordinance in the year 1895. This was when the decision was made to have streets keep one name along their entire length, instead … Continue reading
Discovering History through Digitized Newspapers
Washington State is rich in digital resources for historic research. Many of the research collections of the Washington State Library are on-line. The Washington State Library, a division of the Office of Secretary of State, has launched a new website … Continue reading
The Naming of Seattle
Along with the story of the naming of Seattle’s downtown streets, here on this blog I have also explored ways to find out the meaning of street names outside of the downtown area. The origins of the naming of the … Continue reading
William Strickler in Early Seattle
When I (Valarie) was growing up and attending Wedgwood School in northeast Seattle, city and state history was part of the curriculum of fourth grade. That was when I first heard the amazing stories of “the pioneers,” Seattle’s first white … Continue reading
Searching for the Origins of Seattle Street Names
There is no resource list of the meanings of Seattle’s street names or how the street names were derived. Even the granddaughters of Seattle city founder Arthur Denny were left to speculate on his choices of the names for twelve … Continue reading
Blogging in Seattle History
In September 1991 when my daughter entered kindergarten at Wedgwood School, it was a déjà vu moment for me because she was walking into the same classroom where I had attended in my own kindergarten year at Wedgwood School. As … Continue reading
Seattle Street Names
The vision of a city in the place where Seattle now stands was born in the heart of Arthur Denny, a 29-year-old surveyor in Knox County, Illinois in 1851. As a surveyor Denny knew that in unexplored regions, early-arriving settlers … Continue reading
Marshall Blinn: Logging and Land Speculation in Washington Territory
Before Washington became a state in 1889, territorial land claims recorded many names which are not now well-known. Who were these early-arriving settlers? The map of what is now the Wedgwood and Meadowbrook neighborhoods of northeast Seattle is dotted with … Continue reading
