Sam & Mary Ellen Conroy came to the Wedgwood neighborhood of Seattle in about 1915. They lived a rural lifestyle of using draft horses for construction and road work, and they helped nurture the Chapel of St. Ignatius which met in a log cabin.
A Catholic church was founded in Wedgwood in 1929 by the Jesuits of Seattle University. They bought a forty-acre tract of land with the intention of moving Seattle University to the site, but only one month after the land purchase, the stock market crash of October 1929 set off the economic crisis called the Great Depression, and the university’s moving plans never went forward.
The Wedgwood neighborhood does not have any Victorian houses built in the 1800s, but there is one house, completed in 2007, built in the Queen Anne style which was popular more than a century ago in Seattle. The house is at 3056 NE 87th Street.
The Wedgwood Post Office at 7714 35th Ave NE and the Hunter Tree Farm at 7744 are on the former site of the Herkenrath house, built in 1926.
After Grant McVicar finished service with the Navy in World War Two, he returned to Seattle and went into business with his father. The McVicars rented a brand-new storefront on the west side of 35th Ave NE between NE 85th and 86th Streets. McVicar Hardware operated 1946 to 1986, thriving in the climate of the post-war housing boom with young families fixing up their homes and yards in Wedgwood.
The development of Wedgwood’s first business district began with J.W. (Joe) Shauer, an enterprising businessman who moved his family from Greenwood to Wedgwood in 1918. Mr. Shauer (pronounced shower) paid $1,000 for an acre of property on the west side of 35th Ave NE between NE 85th to 86th Streets. On the corner of NE 86th Street, the site now occupied by Wells Fargo Bank, the Shauers built a one-room house with a screened porch on one side. The house was truly “out in the country,” as it was without running water or electricity; electricity wasn’t brought that far out on 35th Ave NE until 1923.
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North corner of 7500 35th Ave NE struck by this vehicle on January 12, 2020. The driver lost control and swerved off the road.
On January 12, 2020, a car swerved off the road and struck the northernmost corner of the building at 7500 35th Ave NE, in the block to the north of the Wedgwood Safeway. The incident has caused renewed interest in the history of this building. The original building of 1926 was a neighborhood grocery; from 1934 to 1948 it was Ida’s Inn Beer Parlor.
This is the story of Ida’s Inn and the evolution of the business district at the intersection of NE 75th Street and 35th Ave NE.
The Ihrig family across America
The Ihrig family were German immigrants who ended their westward migration when they came to Seattle in 1883. In 1852 Adam & Mary Ihrig had first settled in northern Illinois in a large German farming community. Adam & Mary decided to move farther west in the 1870s. Their tenth child was born while they lived near Albany, Oregon, again amongst German settlers. But the Ihrig family still kept moving, and by the early 1880s they were in Seattle.
Perhaps Adam & Mary thought that there would be more and better opportunities for their family in the city of Seattle, or perhaps their grown sons persuaded them to move. In the 1880s Seattle had a large German immigrant community with its own churches, social clubs and even a German-language newspaper; the Ihrig family would feel at home. The Washington Territorial Census of 1883 recorded that the older Ihrig sons worked in downtown Seattle that year as blacksmiths, butchers & saloonkeepers.
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In the early 1900s very few people lived in the Wedgwood area of northeast Seattle. Many who did come were immigrants or first-generation Americans from Germany, Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands. Others came from across the United States, hoping to get a new start in Seattle.
People who bought land in Wedgwood in the early 1900s were willing to live a rural lifestyle so that they could afford to have their own homes. It was common for people to keep chickens and cows at their Wedgwood homes up until the 1940s.
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Mr. John Guisebertus Hoetmer and Miss Anna Pauline Timmerman were married in Holland in 1906, shortly before joining a group of twenty people immigrating to America. (Holland is a western province of what is now the Netherlands.) Most of the people in the 1906 immigrant group were related to one another through the Timmerman and Lobberegt (pronounced Lob-er-ette) families. The families determined to leave their native land to save their sons from forced conscription into the military. Family patriarch “Uncle Joe” Lobberegt preceded the group to America and agreed to sponsor them for immigration. He had to promise the U.S. government that he would feed the group and see that they learned to speak English.
The Seattle City Clerk’s on-line map of the Wedgwood neighborhood spells it with the extra “e.”
Bud & Dolly Gagnon were the owners of the WedgEwood Pharmacy from 1952 to 1972 (spelled with that extra “e!!”)
The Gagnons saw the drugstore business evolve from old-time traditions into the streamlined service of the modern era.
Note the comments at the end of this article from Gagnon family members and from long-time neighborhood residents.
Beginnings: Bud & Dolly Gagnon
Bud Gagnon served in the Army Air Force during World War Two, and afterward he attended the University of Washington on the GI Bill (education funding for veterans.)
Bud met his wife Dolly in 1948 when he was working at his first job at a pharmacy in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. The Gagnons moved to Kent where Bud worked at a small pharmacy for the first four years of their married life. In 1952 Bud was told by a pharmaceutical salesman that McGee’s Drugstore in the Wedgwood neighborhood of Seattle was planning to sell out. Bud took the opportunity to buy McGee’s store.
Wedgwood in Seattle History 