First On First

TO A RETIREMENT of writing memories about his battles, Col. Granville Haller blazed his last trail. With wife Henrietta and their four children, Haller built the first mansion on First Hill. There were as yet no streets, so the home, at the future northeast corner of Minor and James, was approached by path.

"Castlemount" — the family's name for it — stood so high that at night the light in its tower could be seen from the end of Yesler's wharf. It helped that by then Yesler had clear-cut First Hill and also that no exotic urban landscape had grown to shroud the new mansion's singularity on the Seattle horizon. Still, Henrietta soon went to work draping this naked landscape with flowers. Known for her gardening, she was also generous with her bulbs, helping her new neighbors plant their own flower beds.

Henrietta's talents were also applied inside. At night by candlelight she made hooked rugs to help warm the high-ceilinged rooms that were often drafty in the cold months. Some of the drafts, no doubt, came from the crawl space below the first floor, where, in shallow ground, Indian skulls had been found when the foundation for the big home was being prepared.

These bleached body parts were on permanent exhibition at Castlemount beside the oil portraits of several of Henrietta's 17th-century English ancestors. The colonel who had fought in several Indian wars, the war with Mexico, the Civil War and the exceptionally bloodless "Pig War" in the San Juans, may have found inspiration in them for his writing.

(Note: Most of these tidbits of Haller history were recycled from Margaret Pitcairn Strachan's always-helpful series on Seattle mansions, published weekly in The Seattle Times in 1944-45.)

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.