Background
Grose was born in Washington, District of Columbia, to a free black restaurant owner.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
William Grose
Edit ProfileCareer
His former ranch on the outskirts of town, along East Madison Street, eventually became the center of Seattle"s black middle class. In 1876 Grose opened a restaurant and hotel on Yesler Way called "Our House", which was popular with Seattle"s largely white population, and later added a barbershop. Restaurants and barber shops were two of the only occupations open to blacks in pioneer Seattle, which, though it did not have the explicitly racist laws of neighboring states like Oregon and Idaho, offered black opportunity only in limited, usually menial positions.
The important lumbering, mining, and shipping industries of early Seattle and environs were closed to blacks.
Seattle"s first black resident, Manuel Lopes (who arrived in 1858, just seven years after the Denny Party landed on Alki), also was a cook and a barber. Grose"s hotel provided lodging for many of Seattle"s earliest black residents, who arrived as transient laborers in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
He was successful enough to buy, in 1882, twelve acres along East Madison Street from Henry Yesler. After Grose"s hotel burned in the Great Seattle Fire in 1889, he moved his home there, which still stands at 1733 24th Avenue.
He gradually sold off house lots to other successful African-Americans in Seattle"s small community, and this area became the northern anchor of what eventually became Seattle"s Central District.
The southern anchor, Jackson Street, was poorer, more transient, and rowdier, being part of Pioneer Square. By the 1890s, Grose was Seattle"s wealthiest black resident. In 1891 Grose, along with Doctor Samuel Burdett and Conrad Rideout, formed the Cornerstone Grand Lodge of the York Masons, Seattle"s first black Masonic chapter.
Women relatives of the black Masons formed the Queen of Sheba Court.
This lodge led annual parades down Madison Street from its inception until the 1940s. Grose died on July 27, 1898 and is buried in Lake View Cemetery (Seattle).
Membership
He was that city"s second black resident, and the wealthiest nineteenth-century member of Seattle"s black community.
