Fremont History Articles
1937 Works Progress Administration (WPA) photos of Fremont properties
Digital photo collection by Margaret Heather Pihl (née McAuliffe)
WPA Project: The digital photo collection is comprised of nearly 3,000 digital images of photos taken in Fremont in 1937 as part of a countywide Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The WPA project was conducted between 1937 and 1941 and involved documentation and a photo survey of properties in King County for taxation purposes. The survey was conducted in north-south strips (township ranges), starting at the western end of King County and ending by the Cascades.
Coralee Steele
Fremont resident, Colonel Coralee Steele, was in charge of the World War II field hospital in France that followed General Patton, landing in Normandy the day after D-day.
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Coralee
I. Steele was born on February 13, 1903, the 13th
of 14 children of David Matthew Steele and Elizabeth Blevins Steele.
The family lived at 608 Blewett St. (now N. 35th
St.) in Fremont. The house would have been near the site where the
brick Thompson Building now stands,
Fremont and Seattle’s Ship Canal
Seattle’s earliest white settlers saw immediately that it would be possible to connect its freshwater lakes to the saltwater Puget Sound by means of a canal. At a Fourth of July picnic in 1854, Thomas Mercer proposed the name of Lake Union because that body of water was in the middle between Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west.
Seattle settlers of the 1850s Thomas Mercer and David Denny took land claims at the south end of Lake Union near today’s Seattle Center.
