Naming Rights: Ballard
This is the latest in a series of posts examining the naming origins of our Seattle neighborhoods.
We began last week with Fremont, so let's move west to Ballard.
The namesake for this neighborhood known for its Scandinavian heritage is the decidedly non-Nordic William Rankin Ballard, an Ohio native who grew up largely in Oregon. According to this Historylink essay, Ballard was captain of the Zephyr--a steamboat owned by his brother. Legend has it that Ballard lost a coin toss with a business partner, making him the owner of 160 acres of land outside Seattle, considered worthless because it had already been logged. He joined forces with neighboring land owners John Leary, Judge Thomas Burke, and Daniel H. Gilman--all surnames that should sound familiar--to transform the area into a thriving center of industry.
The group made a tidy profit developing the area, especially when the railroad came through. Like many of Seattle's neighborhoods, Ballard was founded as its own city, incorporated in 1890 and named for one of its primary developers. By 1900, Ballard, Washington had 4,568 residents, and was the second largest city in Washington.
As Julie Pheasant-Albright writes in her book Early Ballard:
By 1905, Ballard had electric lights, a good water system, two weekly papers, a sewage system, a police force, a hospital, a telephone system (with free long distance to Seattle), two telegraph systems, laundries, dairies, 12 mills, mill yard, ship yards, dry docks, a fire department, two streetcar lines and about 10,000 inhabitants.
What Ballard did not have, ironically, was water. The rapid population made it difficult to provide water to residents, and in 1906 the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that Seattle was not obligated to share its drinking water with surrounding towns.
The water issue is largely what caused the City of Ballard to become part of Seattle on May 29, 1907. According to this essay over at Historylink, Ballard's fancy city hall was famously draped in black crepe and the flag flew at half-staff. Many residents resisted the idea of annexation, and actually voted it down previously in 1905.
A rumor of a dead horse found in Ballard's only reservoir might have swayed some voters the second time around, though according to Pheasant-Albright, "Cynical Ballardites still believe that the horse did not commit suicide and that it did not end up there by accident."
