Two generations of Kiehls owned and occupied the house built by H. Ambrose Kiehl at 421 W. Galer St. in 1905. Their lives were captured in the many photographs taken by Ambrose from 1890 to 1917 and preserved by his daughter Laura Adele Keihl over the succeeding decades.
These photographs record the family life of the Kiehls and the work of Ambrose as a civil engineer employed by the U.S. Army at Fort Lawton and other western locations.
On the move
H. Ambrose Kiehl was born in 1865 in Dayton, Ohio, and trained as a civil engineer at Ohio State University. In the 1880s, he moved to Port Townsend, where he opened an engineering office and met and married his wife, Louisa Jean Stockland, the daughter of Scottish immigrants. Their daughter Laura was born in Port Townsend on Nov. 15, 1892.
When it became clear that Port Townsend would not become a major Pacific Coast port, they moved to Seattle.
There, in 1896, he met W.W. Robinson, a captain in the U.S. Army and the quartermaster charged with assembling the land and resources for construction of a military fort on Magnolia Bluff. At that time, the area was still a forested wilderness. Robinson appointed Ambrose civil engineer for the project, responsible for surveying, clearing, grading and platting the fort. Ambrose also supervised the construction of the fort, which was named after a Spanish-American War hero.
The site was selected by the Army for its strategic location and as a result of the lobbying of Seattle’s political and economic elite, who were anxious about keeping the peace in Seattle. They had experienced the mob violence that sparked the 1885-1886 anti-Chinese riots and were grateful for the role the Army had played in restoring law and order. They believed that the fort would benefit the Seattle economy.
The Kiehl family had, by this time, grown to four, with the addition of a second daughter, Lorena Miriam Kiehl, born in Seattle in 1895.
In 1896, the family moved from its home at 105 Republican St. into a rustic, board-and-batten shack on the grounds of the fort, a structure that served as their temporary residence and Ambrose’s office.
Three years later, the Kiehls relocated to completed officers’ quarters, staying for several years until the Army occupied Fort Lawton. It was from this comfortable residence that Ambrose purchased the land at 421 W. Galer St. and planned the construction of his house on Queen Anne.
Later, after the completion of Fort Lawton, he was employed as a civil engineer at Forts Flagler, Worden, Casey, Canby and Columbia in Washington; Fort Stevens in Oregon; Fort Seward in Haines, Alaska; and Fort Warren in Cheyenne, Wyo.
Ambrose’s artistry as a photographer is evident in the photograph taken on June 27, 1900, on the Fort Lawton property. His work took him on foot, horseback and by horse or donkey cart around the 700 acres donated by Seattle citizens for the base.
Outside of family and career, his lifelong passions were photography and music. As a photographer, Ambrose used both gelatin dry plates (glass) and Eastman Flexible roll film, introduced in 1886.
Ambrose probably had a number of cameras, and he processed most of the images himself. He kept a detailed notebook of about 950 of his photographs, recording the subject, location and date of each photograph. His last entry in this notebook was in 1937.
Ambrose was also a renowned musician. He paid his way through college playing the pipe organ. Later, at the Queen Anne churches he and his family attended, he played the organ and directed the choir.
After an eventful and productive life, Ambrose passed away in September 1942 at age 77. His wife, Louisa, had died much earlier, in 1917, when Laura was 25.
Its place in the neighborhood
Studying the 1905 Kiehl House on Queen Anne’s West Galer Street reveals stories and images not only of the family that built the house but also of the history of the neighborhood’s growth at the turn of the 20th century.
Facing north on a prominent corner across the street from the Queen Anne School (later West Queen Anne Elementary School), the Kiehl House was built three short years after the completion of the tracks of the No. 33 streetcar line.
This is the line that ran from downtown to the Counterbalance on Queen Anne Avenue, turned west on Galer and then north on Sixth Avenue West to West McGraw Street. In those days, the line did not go all the way to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The No. 26 (now the No. 3 electric-trolley line), which ran on Taylor Avenue, did that.
When H. Ambrose Kiehl chose a neighborhood for his home, he did just what real estate developers wanted him to do: He followed the streetcar tracks to an empty lot. Located on a prominent corner opposite the West Queen Anne Elementary School and just down the street from a growing commercial district, the lot H. Ambrose Kiehl selected for his family probably didn’t cost him much.
Many of Seattle’s neighborhoods would be developed as streetcar suburbs, mirroring the same dynamics that produced New York City’s Westchester County or the cities near Boston like Brookline, Medford and Watertown.
It is no coincidence that Stone & Webster, a Boston company, built many of Seattle’s streetcar lines or that places such as Ravenna and Phinney Ridge were actually developed by those who first built street railways to lure people to the sites they had for sale.
The Kiehl photographs
In the 1970s, the Kiehl collection of photographs came to the attention of Frederick and Mia Mann, preservationists who were actively involved in the effort to preserve Fort Lawton as Discovery Park.
Prior to her death, after consultation with the Manns, Laura Kiehl donated the historic collection to Discovery Park and to the Special Collections Libraries of the University of Washington.
In 1995, Sara W. Smith, a granddaughter of the Manns, obtained a grant from the King County Landmarks and Heritage Commission to organize the collection, copy negatives and create prints. These are now housed at Discovery Park and with the city archivist.
The Allen Library at the University of Washington retains all originals, including the negatives and photo albums. A selection of the photographs and Smith’s introduction to the collection can be viewed on-line at content.lib.washington.edu/kiehlweb/index.html.
JAN HADLEY is a member and Michael Herschensohn is president of the Queen Anne Historical Society (www.qahistory.org).