Today, Seattle is a UNESCO “City of Literature,” known for its authors, bookstores and highly educated population.
The road to that accomplishment began in the muck and mire of the frontier city, paved by the folks who built a fortune from the original Skid Road.
Just how did that happen?
Henry Yesler and his wife Sarah were enormously influential pioneers, key players in shaping frontier Seattle. Henry Yesler opened the town’s first industry, his steam sawmill, which cut up logs that were skidded down Mill Street — now Yesler Way — to his lumbermill. That stretch became known as Skid Road. Henry became mayor, was a powerful property owner, and eventually amassed the first fortune made in the city.
His wife, Sarah, was an early feminist and civic activist, who, along with Henry, was intrigued by spiritualism. They did not attend church, staying home to the tut-tutting of God-fearing neighbors. They were freethinkers in an unconventional marriage: Henry had a daughter, Julia, by Susan, herself the daughter of a Duwamish chief. Sarah had intimate relationships with at least two women.
Together, the pair made many contributions to the city, of which at least two were literary.
They were friends with an itinerant astrologer named William Chaney who stayed in their home for a time. Chaney gave astrological readings and lectured on “Astro-Theology.” He developed a relationship with an unmarried boarder who also lived in the Yesler home, Flora Wellman, who offered her services as a teacher of music and elocution. Chaney eventually left to ply his trade in San Francisco. Flora moved there too. Chaney got Flora pregnant, and scandalously abandoned her. Flora went on to have that child and married a man named John London. They called the new baby boy Jack London. Without the Yeslers acting as matchmakers, the celebrated author of Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Martin Eden might never have existed.
The Yeslers’ other literary contribution was more intentional. Sarah started the city’s first library, the Seattle Literary Association, a private group she formed in 1868. Annual dues were $1.50; 50 cents for “ladies.” In a city with about 1,000 inhabitants, they had a starting membership of 50 individuals. The library was formed before the city’s first plumbed bathtub was in operation. The association’s purpose was to promote “mental culture and social intercourse.”
On April 1, 1869, the library purchased its first books by placing a $60 order with A. L. Bancroft & Co., of San Francisco, publishers, stationers and booksellers.
But attendance at the Seattle Literary Association sputtered. The private library withered and died in 1881. Its books were donated to the Washington Territorial University. But in 1888, the new Ladies Library Association revived the idea. Henry and Sarah donated books to the new private library.
In 1890, the city took steps to create a true publicly funded library, which opened in 1891. In 1899 the library moved into the grand Yesler mansion, where it was housed until it burned down in 1901. Five years later a new public library was dedicated at Fourth Avenue and Madison Street, where the current incarnation of the main library exists to this day.
What were the first books on the shelves of Seattle’s early libraries?
The records are sketchy, but the Seattle Public Library has a narrow library ledger from 1889. The first 10 books on the list suggest that some of the volumes might have come from Sarah’s original library. Nine of the first 10 books were popular titles in print at the time of that first order in 1869.
Among the first 10 were three books by bestselling author J. G Holland, the editor of Scribner’s. One, Letters to Young People, Single and Married, offered life advice. The 19th-century novelist Edward Eggleston wrote that Holland was “the most popular and effective preacher of social and domestic moralities in his age, the oracle of the active and ambitious young man; of the susceptible and enthusiastic young woman …”
Books #4 and #5, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table and The Professor at the Breakfast Table, were popular collections of essays by the Boston physician, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes. They contain such popular pearls of wisdom as “Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable,” a observation that helps explain Tik Tok and Instagram.
Books #6, #7, and #8 were works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was then making a living writing essays about domestic life for Heart and Home Illustrated magazine. Book #9 was Mountaineering by Clarence King, head of the U.S. Geodetic Survey.
And #10 was Gates Ajar, an 1868 novel about the afterlife that appealed to spiritualists and post-Civil War families who had lost loved ones, portraying heaven as a kind of idealized life on earth with friends and family reunited — a view considered blasphemous by many at the time. It sold 80,000 copies.
Libraries were seen as tools to pull the city out of its gritty Skid Road reputation. In 1895, Seattle’s head librarian, Charles Wesley Smith, made the case that libraries added value to the community. Remember that the city’s early tax base and economy depended on prostitution, saloons and gambling. “The city’s highest interests,” Smith wrote, “should not be mated to its lowest; the center of sweetness and light for the community should not have its benign influences limited by reckoning its sole revenue in terms of suffering and crime.”
Skid Road was a slippery logging road, but it soon came to represent an area of blight and vice. While Skid Road defined early Seattle, it also quietly provided a financial foundation for Henry and Sarah Yesler’s desire for a literary city — if not a city on a hill, then one that flourished because of a slick and muddy slope.
