Columbia City: Watch it Grow!

Children on Ferdinand Street, standing in front of the future Columbia Motor Co. site, 1903, Hall Summers Pioneer Collection [1993.001.0404]

Taking In the View: A photographer whose eye is on the children provides a record for the history archives of a slice of the Columbia City streetscape in early May 1903, looking north across Ferdinand Street with buildings along today’s Rainier Avenue South, then the Seattle, Renton & Southern Railway tracks, visible on the left. All aboard! The three-windowed gabled house in the center no longer exists (built in 1893). Behind the children is about where we find the Ferdinand Festival Street seating area now. Then, a long-dressed woman walked past vacant property on wooden planks.

To the far left, the ornate top of the Knights of Pythias Hall can be seen in the distance, then owned by W.W. “Bill” Phalen. Upon his arrival in 1901, he had purchased the building and opened his Reliance General Store in the north storefront, offering delivery by horse and carriage. Phalen quickly made a name for himself in Columbia and was elected mayor twice. He founded the volunteer fire department, formed a local baseball team, and established the annual summer festival, Rainier Valley Fiesta. Looking again, a little peaked-roof wooden building blocks our view of Phalen’s grocery.

Seattle photographer Asahel Curtis’s panorama taken from the west looking across Rainier offers an eyeful. Across from the two-story Columbia Hotel at the southeast corner of Rainier and Ferdinand Street, that small building sits with its storefront plastered with real estate advertising – Right Here Lakewood. Mount Baker resident Charles B. Dodge had replatted Lakewood for sale in 1903 through his Pioneer Square offices. He was also the owner of the property along Rainier where the little no-frills real estate office stood along the streetcar tracks. 

Columbia City, Ferdinand St. and Rainier, vacant lot, future home of Columbia Motor Co., Asahel Curtis, Photographer, circa 1908, UW Special Collections, 31146

By 1904 Dodge had married his third wife and lived at the edge of Lake Washington in a home with five bedrooms, four baths, seven fireplaces and two servants. Today’s Lakewood Moorage property was once Dodge’s private boathouse. On the property where the real estate office was plus two lots to the north, the one-story brick Dodge Building was built in 1908 at a cost of $4,000. An early tenant in the southern storefront (today’s Geraldine’s Counter) was Goebel’s Cash Store, conducting business right across the streetcar tracks from the successful W.W. Phalen, Your Grocer.

Before their marriage, Henry Goebel and Louisa Schmidt were both immigrants from Germany in the late 1800s and by 1891 Henry was running a grocery in Chicago according to the Polk city directory. The 1900 U.S. Census shows a “Lizzie” Schmidt, age 16, working as a grocery saleslady in Chicago which may have put her in the sightlines of Henry the grocer. Their daughter Minnie was born there in 1902 and by 1904 they had all moved on to Seattle, where they operated a grocery on Twelfth Avenue in central Seattle. 

By 1905 the Goebels had a real estate contract for property in the City Gardens plat, near Rainier & South Walker Street. They could be found in Columbia City by 1909. Their cash grocery advertised household commodities, i.e., Goebel’s Best Coffee, 35 cents a pound, and Peter Pan brand toilet paper, 6 rolls for 25 cents. Those were the days. 

An early Columbia resident, Harlow H.A. Hastings had served as the town’s first attorney in 1893 and mayor later in 1900. Hastings lived east of Rainier, up the hill on Angeline Street with his wife Minnie and their children in a big white house with a picket fence. In 1898 Hastings had Fraternity Hall built on the south side of Ferdinand Street west of Rainier (a parking lot now). A one-story brick building in an art deco style went up on the corner in 1905 (now Pagliacci Pizza, Off Alley and Rudy’s Barbershop) and called the Hastings Block. Old-timers long remembered Studley’s Drug Store there with a marble soda fountain and Tiffany lampshade. “Just like downtown!”

Making front page news in The Rainier Valley Times in September 1918, described as the “biggest real estate deal in years,” Henry Goebel had purchased these properties for $16,000. He would be moving the cash grocery from across Rainier into the Hastings Block and using the ground floor of the hall for his warehouse. As an aside, the newspaper goes on to describe Goebel as having “quite recently improved lots which he owned directly in the rear of his present location by building the modern brick structure occupied by the Clark-Baker Auto Company.” Here the paper is describing what is now known as the Columbia Motor Company Building, built in 1917.  

Back to the vacant property on Ferdinand Street in 1903, Henry Goebel had purchased those lots in June of 1916 for $3,000 (with a mortgage) from a man Templeton, of Tolt, Washington. His permit to build a masonry garage there for $4,000 was published in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in February 1917 and soon The Clark-Baker Company was offering “skilled Ford men” for “a little adjusting now and then” (Garage-Supplies-Repairs). They were authorized Ford dealers and advertised touring cars, runabouts and truck chassis shipped brand new from Detroit on order, assembly required.  

A January 19, 1918, profile of Frank S. Clark, “Representative Men of Rainier Valley”, published in The Rainier Valley Times promotes the new business. The Clark-Baker Company consisted of Clark and his brother-in-law, Harry H. Baker, as partners with their father-in-law J.C. Weinberg also involved. Clark stated they had leased the new Ferdinand Street building for five years and could store up to 25 cars.  Baker managed the mechanics to “give all the service any Ford owner could desire” and Clark handled the sales; he was optimistically planning to order 250 cars for the year August 1917-1918 despite World War I restrictions on steel plus a 5% luxury tax on the purchase of new passenger cars. 

Along with two mechanics, Pierre Weiss rounded out the team, a familiar face in Columbia City. Weiss was 15 years old when his father brought the family out from South Dakota in 1905. As a young man Pierre was one of Phalen’s volunteer firemen and played football and basketball with the Rainier Valley Athletic Club. In his early twenties, he ran a confectionery along Rainier Avenue in Columbia City that was said to have included sporting goods along with the sweets and cigars. His June of 1917 World War I draft card has him employed at Clark-Baker as salesman; his wartime service in France would cause but a short interruption until his discharge in March 1919. 

Salesman Pierre Weiss standing with Ed Thanom at Clark-Baker Motor Co., 1001 South Jackson Street, October 1920. [RVHS 05.011-02H]

After just three years, in August of 1920, Clark-Baker Company announced their move to Tenth Avenue & Jackson Street to sell and service their Fords. A city mechanic, L.E. Thompson leased the space at Goebel’s building on Ferdinand Street for a repair and storage shop. “Let Thompson Fix It” was his motto, offering gas, oils and greases as Columbia Auto Service. 

But, wait, in late December 1922, The Seattle Daily Times reported that Clark-Baker would soon be returning to Ferdinand Street. The newly formed Columbia Motor Company with Pierre Weiss as the third partner would offer parts, service, tires and accessories as authorized Ford dealers. It was not long before Clark had made a trip to the Chevrolet factory in Portland to take a look. During the slack season that fall, Clark is quoted in The Rainier Valley Times, “Business in new cars is down because people in the valley are not real car buyers”. That year’s holiday advertisement asked, Why Not a Ford for Christmas? 

3806 Ferdinand Street, Columbia Motor Co., 1930 [RVHS 2003.022.0007]

Columbia Motor Company became the exclusive Chevrolet dealer for the Rainier District in January 1924, as General Motors challenged Henry Ford’s domination of the automobile market. The Model T had lost the public’s favor. “Say it with Chevrolet!” was the slogan.

The Chevrolet years led into the Dodge-Plymouth years through the mid 1940s. In the 1920s, the Goebels had settled into West Seattle, purchasing and developing commercial real estate, running a grocery at the junction, while leasing out their Columbia City properties. 

As for 3806 South Ferdinand Street, after Henry Goebel’s death, Louisa Goebel owned the property until her death in 1967. The property was then inherited by daughter Minnie Foster and Minnie’s daughters. These three women held onto the property through the Boeing Bust until December of 1976, when they sold for $25,000 to a party of four. 

And now, Rainier Valley Historical Society’s future home since just earlier this year, giving new purpose to the building, from storing autos last century to housing archives this, bringing to mind an old Columbia City promotion, Watch It Grow! 

Project Team members: Katie McClure, John Bennett, and Tim Burdick, on-site - Summer 2025.