Wedgwood, Seattle
| Wedgwood | |
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| Seattle Neighborhood | |
The Picardo Farm P-Patch community garden in Wedgwood.
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 Map of Wedgwood's location in Seattle |
Wedgwood is a middle class residential neighborhood of northeast Seattle, Washington with a modest commercial strip. Wedgwood is located about two miles (3 km) north, and slightly east, of the University of Washington; it is about six miles (10 km) northeast of Downtown. The neighborhood is further typical of Seattle neighborhoods in having more than one name and having different, overlapping, but well-documented definitions of the neighborhood.
The misspelling Wedgewood is not uncommon—it is used by at least five businesses and even appears in the unofficial City Clerk's Neighborhood Map Atlas—but the origin and spelling of the name are clear: the neighborhood was named after the English bone china-maker Wedgwood, the favorite of the wife of Albert ("Al") Balch (1903–1976), the developer who named the neighborhood. Balch was also the founder of adjoining View Ridge.
The area has been inhabited since the end of the last glacial period (c. 8,000 BCE—10,000 years ago). The Dkhw'Duw'Absh, "the People of the Inside", and the xachua'bsh or hah-choo-AHBSH, "People of a Large Lake" or "Lake People", today the Duwamish tribe, Native Americans of the Lushootseed (Skagit-Nisqually) Coast Salish hunted and traveled through what is now Wedgwood. The Wedgwood Rock, a glacial erratic boulder 19 ft (5.8 m) tall by 75 ft (23 m) circumference became the intersection of a number of trails through dense, old growth forest that covered what is now Seattle. The neighborhood has adopted Big Rock after it was protected from housing development in 1941.
The land that formed the original core of Wedgwood, west of 35th Avenue NE between 80th and 85th Streets, was at one time a heavily wooded ginseng farm. Charles E. Thorpe had cleared a portion of his 40-acre (160,000 m2) tract north of the Seattle city limits of the time, building a log cabin from the wood of his own trees. By the 1920s, 35th Avenue NE was becoming a thoroughfare with homes and businesses (the first store opened in 1922), the electric (1923), water (1926), and sewer grids had been extended to the area, and it was becoming too urban for Thorpe's tastes. The Jesuit institution Seattle University paid Thorpe $65,000 for the property, planning to build a new campus there and move north from First Hill. Thorpe left Seattle, never to return.
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