Fraternal group plans tribute today for Seattle pioneer of ill repute

It's not going to be your usual Mother's Day commemoration today at noon at Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill.

It'll be in honor of Mary Ann Conklin, whose small, drab concrete marker simply says:

"Mother Damnable Conklin, Died 1887"

Forget about any loving reminiscences of this Seattle pioneer.

There aren't any. She was a most unlikable woman.

She swore often and colorfully. She carried rocks in her apron to throw at people who irked her. On the top floor of the hotel she managed, she was said to run a brothel. And about 10 years after she died, according to legend, she calcified and turned into 1,300 pounds of stone, a smile on her face.

A fraternal group known as the Clampers doesn't want Seattle to forget about Mother Damnable, who also was known as Madame Damnable. It isn't just the Hortons, Mercers and Yeslers who made the city, they say, but also characters such as Conklin.

"They fade off into the mist unless we bring them to people's attention," said Dan Kerege, a tugboat dispatcher who's head of the Seattle Clampers society.

At the cemetery, it won't be hard to find the Clampers. It's not a group that takes itself all that seriously.

They will be wearing red shirts and black vests covered with buttons and badges with slogans such as, "Clampers 3 basic food groups ... 1) Bottles, 2) Cans, 3) Draft."

The formal name of their group is E Clampus Vitus, a male-only fraternity started during the California Gold Rush, more as parody of elite fraternities. Even the name doesn't mean anything. But over the years, the society evolved into a genuine historic-preservation group.

Standing around her gravesite this week, Kerege and other Clampers told stories about Mother Damnable.

Conklin merited prominent mention in the memoirs of Navy Rear Admiral Thomas S. Phelps, when he wrote about serving on the sloop-of-war U.S. Decatur in Seattle from 1855 to 1856.

Besides taking part in the one-day "Battle of Seattle" on Jan. 26, 1856, against Native Americans, the sailors also were building roads and burning bushes in which the Native Americans might hide.

The problem was that Mother Damnable didn't want bushes around her hotel burned. Her whorehouse, wrote the late historian Bill Speidel, "hinged on privacy ... And if the United States Navy burned down the bushes, they burned up her customers."

Phelps remembered:

"... the moment our men appeared upon the scene, with three dogs at her heels, and an apron filled with rocks, this termagant would come tearing out of the house, and the way stones, oaths, and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate, and, charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth in the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way ... . "

Mother Damnable was born in 1821. She died in 1873, although for some reason, her gravestone lists the wrong year. There is no mention of her having any children.

About a decade and a half after she died, the cemetery she was first buried in was turned into a park, so she was reburied in Lake View Cemetery.

As the story goes, workers were surprised at how much the casket weighed, and found she had turned to stone.

But Peter Lape, curator of archaeology at the Burke Museum, said calcification isn't likely in Seattle soils. If it ever were to happen, it would take several hundred years, if not a thousand years.

"Sounds like a tall tale, but a very good one," he said.

That some of the stories around Mother Damnable can't be verified doesn't matter to Kerege.

"We definitely have a shortage of colorful characters these days," he said. "We've got to hang on to what we've got."

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com