3119 South Day Street
Seattle, WA, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Will H. Thompson House

Statement of Significant:

The Will H. Thompson House is one of Seattle's largest and most nearly intact examples of a towered Queen Anne residence. One of the earliest homes in the Atlantic Street-Mount Baker community, it has been preserved without significant changes despite its many years of use as sanitarium and boarding house. During the turn of the century, it was the home of prominent Seattle attorney Will H. Thompson.

The builder of the house was Ernest A. MacKay, who in April, 1894, applied for a permit to erect the structure at an estimated cost of $4,500. MacKay was listed in Polk's Seattle Directory of 1897 as secretary and treasurer of the Puget Sound Glass Company; in the 1905 directory he was identified as the president of the Washington Manufacturing Company. In 1897 MacKay's house was sold at public auction and was subsequently purchased by Will H. Thompson, attorney, and his wife, Ida.

Will H. Thompson was born in 1848 in Calhoun, Georgia, and educated as a civil engineer at the Georgia Military Institute. Following the Civil War, he began the study of law, which he continued after moving to Indiana, and was admitted to the Indiana bar in 1872. In 1889 Thompson settled in Seattle and established the law firm of Thompson, Edsen and Humphries. He was especially noted for his oratorical skills, and in the political campaign which preceded the admission of Washington as a state in 1889, Thompson was chosen by the state central committee of the Democratic party to meet the Republican challenge in public debate. Although active in furthering the interests of the Democratic party, Thompson sought no office for himself. His firm became one of the most prominent in Seattle, numbering among its clients the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, for which Thompson was chief counsel. Thompson's son Maurice occupied the Will H. Thompson House from 1907 (presumably upon the death of his father) until 1917. During the 1920's and 1930's, it was operated as the Mount Baker Sanitarium under various owners. In the years of World War II, it was a rooming house for young women, and it continued to be used for multiple occupancy until purchased by the present owners in 1976. A careful restoration of the house as a private residence has been underway since that time.

The Will H. Thompson House is architecturally significant as an example of a former building type made increasingly rare in the Seattle area by radically changing preferences in style and scale. Houses of its size, if they have survived at all, have not readily maintained or recovered their role as single-family dwellings, nor escaped the denaturing of their original architectural character. The long-term integrity of the Will H. Thompson House may have been aided by the fact that although it is a fully developed representative of the Queen Anne style, with its interplay and contrast of textures, wall planes, and roof forms, it is nonetheless sufficiently restrained in its ornament and mass to make it perhaps more acceptable to later tastes than a more exuberant example would be. It is an important contribution to the understanding of the architectural history of its time and place.