PAUL DORPAT

FRANK LAROCHE WAS born in Philadelphia in 1853, the year Henry Yesler got the first steam sawmill on Puget Sound operating at the foot of Mill Street (Yesler Way) in Seattle. Thirty-seven years later LaRoche made this record of Yesler's Wharf when the city was still rebuilding from its Great Fire of 1889.

Even before the fire, Yesler moved his mill to Union Bay on Lake Washington. The wharf was too valuable a commercial space to be wasted on processing logs. The corralled timber floating here in the foreground may be logs picked for piles in rebuilding the waterfront. Or this may be merely the log pond for the Stetson and Post mill that was then just off the tide flats south of King Street.

LaRoche had worked as a professional since his late teens, taking assignments from railroads and publishers, opening studios in Salt Lake and Des Moines and teaching photography in New Orleans. As might be expected after he arrived on Puget Sound in 1889, his work hereabouts is some of the best extant. The University of Washington Northwest Collection has about 400 Puget Sound examples, but he shot many more, including several thousand as he followed the Alaska gold rush of the late 1890s.

The professional has dated this view December 1890. Here the LaRoche oeuvre included many of what were then our "obligatory" subjects such as Mount Rainier and Chief Seattle's daughter, Princess Angeline. But he also left us cityscapes of every sort, including waterfront scenes like this one.

After he moved to Arlington, a popular trick was cramming Snohomish County lumberjacks together atop huge cedar stumps for company portraits. LaRoche continued to act the pro until the mid-1920s and lived until 1936.

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