My father was raised on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, across the street from the lush heath of Volunteer Park. Two doors from his family home an elderly gentleman resided with a mysterious woman. My grandfather, a teetotalling Baptist, noted that the nearby man – a retired cleric in the Roman Catholic church – rarely left his home. It was also noted by my grandfather that regular deliveries of alcoholic libations were made to his neighbor’s back door. A ten-year-old boy in knickers, who later become my father, was also observing the last years of a Seattle pioneer.
The female companion to the elderly priest was his niece, Marie Rose Pauze. Father Francis Xavier Prefontaine, who would be made a Monsignor by Pope Pius X just before he died, established the first Roman Catholic chapel in Seattle. But his life had more facets than building – with his own hands – Our Lady of Good Help Church at Third Avenue and Washington Street, a few feet from what became known as “Skid Road.”
Like many other Puget Sound priests, Prefontaine came from Quebec, Canada. His first local assignment was to convert the residents of Fort Stevens, Oyster Bay and Chinook Point – tiny outposts at the mouth of the Columbia River.
After a gloomy ride in a Native canoe to his new assignment, he disembarked in the rain and rolled into his blanket for the night. When he awoke the next morning, he found a dead Native next to him and hammocks of other deceased remains hanging overhead. His Native guide had deposited him in the midst of an old burial ground.
At Steilacoom – a mighty town in the 1860s – he became friendly with Mother Joseph Pariseau of the Sisters of Providence. Known to be a clever architect and handy with carpenter’s tools, Mother Joseph established Sisters of Providence facilities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps Father Prefontaine became adept at using a hammer and nails in the company of Mother Joseph?
Following a stint of service at Port Townsend where he helped establish St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church, he arrived in the bustling port city of Seattle. The big town then boasted a population of 600 mostly irreligious souls. Again, disembarking from a Native canoe, Prefontaine beached next to Henry Yesler’s sawmill. For $6 a month he rented a tiny homemade chapel for two women parishioners out of Seattle’s reported ten Roman Catholic residents.
Today’s Prefontaine Place, a curving one block street from Washington to Yesler Avenues, was once a clear creek. Great trees hung over the banks, and implements and cannon balls were found by Prefontaine in the creek bed, souvenirs from the January 1856 “Battle of Seattle.”
Upon Father Prefontaine’s death he left a bequest of $5,000 to the city for the construction of a public fountain. Today that blue-tiled pool rests at the junction of Yesler and Third, not far from the site of the young priest’s $6 a month clapboard room and chapel.
Fifteen years after the founding of Our Lady of Help church, Chinese riots occurred at the same intersection, which was then the heart of Chinatown. Strangely, this area was also remembered by old timers as the nearby site of Lou Graham’s famous Seattle bordello – the earth world meeting heaven at the edge of a once-bubbling wading pool.
