Dearborn House

Dearborn House. Built 1907. The Dearborn House currently serves as Historic Seattle’s headquarters. The Classical Revival style building was constructed for Henry H. Dearborn (1844 - 1909), an East Coast investment banker who relocated to Seattle in the 1880s. He was instrumental in the development south of the city’s core. After making his fortune in 1903 through the sale of the tidelands. Dearborn purchased this site on the First Hill in 1904 and commissioned architect Henry Dozier (1855 - 1914) to design the house. It was constructed at a cost of $15,000., When the first non-Native settlers arrived on the shores of Elliott Bay, the place that would become First Hill was covered with dense, old-growth forest. Indigenous communities had been settled along the waters of Puget Sound and Lake Washington for thousands of years. They called what would become Seattle the “Little Crossing-Over Place,” with trails connecting communities from the bay to the lake., In the 1880s, following the area’s planting by pioneer Arthur Denny, First Hill also became the location of homes for Seattle’s elite. Of the 40 or more large residences that once dominated “the Hill,” only four remain , the Stimson-Green, Dearborn, Stacy, and Hofius residences. Over the years, numerous churches, apartment buildings, workers’ housing hotels, social clubs, and hospitals were built in the community., The Dearborn House was converted to professional offices in the 1950s, occupied by a succession of medical practitioners. Historic Seattle acquired the property in 1997 through a generous donation by Patsy Bullitt Collins. The organization renovated the house, bringing it back more closely to its early design. , The Dearborn House is a designated Seattle Landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.