Mrs. Mary A. Denny moved about from place to place, living first in the cabin at Alki Point, then a cabin on Elliott Bay, on the north end of their claim, then another cabin near the great laurel tree, on the site of the Stevens Hotel, Seattle. After a time the family went to Olympia. Her husband was in the Land Office, was a member of the Territorial Legislature and Delegate to Congress; all the while she toiled on in her home with her growing family.
They returned to Seattle and built what was for those times a very good residence on the corner of Pike Street and First Avenue, where they had a fine orchard, and there they lived many years.
After having struggled through long years of poverty, not extreme, to be sure, but requiring much patient toil and endurance, their property became immensely valuable and they enjoyed well deserved affluence.
Mrs. Mary A. Denny’s family consists of four sons and two daughters; Orion O., the second son, was the second white child born in Seattle. Catherine (Denny) Frye, the elder daughter, was happily married in her girlhood and is the mother of a most interesting family. Rolland H., Orion O., A. Wilson and Charles L. Denny, the four sons, are prominent business men of Seattle.
Mrs. Denny makes her home with Lenora, the younger unmarried daughter, at her palatial residence in Seattle. The last mentioned is a traveled, well read woman of most sympathetic nature, devoted to her friends, one who has shown kindness to many strangers in times past as they were guests in her parents’ home.
CHAPTER VII.
HENRY VAN ASSELT OF DUWAMISH.
In the Post-Intelligencer of December 8th and 9th, 1902, appeared the following sketches of this well known pioneer:
“At the ripe old age of 85, with the friendship and affection of every man he knew in this life, Henry Van Asselt, one of the founders of King County, and one of the four of the first white men to set foot on the shores of Elliott Bay, died yesterday morning at his home, on Fifteenth Avenue, of paralysis. Mr. Van Asselt, with Samuel and Jacob Maple and L. M. Collins, landed in a canoe September 14th, 1851, at the mouth of the Duwamish River, where it enters the harbor of Seattle. They had come from the Columbia River and were more than two months in advance of Arthur Denny, one of the pioneer builders of the city of Seattle. Van Asselt’s name is perpetuated through the town of Van Asselt, adjoining the southern limits of the city. He was well known all over the Puget Sound country, and he was the last living member of one of the first bands of white arrivals, on the shores of Elliott Bay.
“Mr. Van Asselt was a Hollander, having been born in Holland April 11, 1817, two years after the battle of Waterloo. He was in his early youth a soldier in the Holland army during its dispute with Belgium. An expert marksman and an indefatigable huntsman, he came to America in 1850, on a sailing schooner, and a year later was traveling the trail from the Central West to California. Instead of going to the land of gold and sunshine, Van Asselt headed north, reaching the Columbia River in the fall of 1850. A year later found him crossing the Columbia River, after a short sojourn in the mining camps of Northern California. With three companions, L. M. Collins, Jacob and Samuel Maple, Henry Van Asselt made the perilous journey from the Columbia River to the Sound, where, near Olympia, he boarded a canoe, and after two days’ traveling reached the mouth of the Duwamish River. Ascending the stream to the junction of the White and Black Rivers, a distance of only a few miles, he staked out a donation land claim of 320 acres in the heart of the richest section of the Duwamish valley.”