John Leary

Leary, John (1 Nov. 1837-8 Feb. 1905), business leader and politician, was born in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. Virtually nothing is known about his parents or his early life. Apparently relying largely on his own initiative, he prospered in lumber manufacturing and shipping as a young man, and he operated mercantile establishments in his native province. Financial setbacks prompted him to move to Houlton, Maine, where he engaged in the lumber business. In 1858 he married Mary Blanchard. They had no children. In 1869 he followed his interest in lumbering to Seattle, Washington Territory.

Admitted to the Washington bar in 1871, he was one of Seattle's earliest attorneys, a junior partner first in the law firm of McNaught and Leary and, between 1878 and 1882, in Struve, Haines, and Leary. Meanwhile he had become involved in such business and civic enterprises as coal mining, public utilities development, and local politics, and in 1882 he abandoned his law practice to further engage in such activities. After the Northern Pacific Railroad established its northwest terminus at rival Tacoma instead of Seattle, Leary helped organize the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad. Largely locally financed, it eventually laid no more than twenty miles of track between Seattle and the mining region southeast of town, and the small rail line transported coal for local use and for export. In 1872 Leary and John Talbot opened the Talbot coal mine, and later that decade Leary undertook at his own expense extensive surveys of coal and other mineral resources throughout western Washington and into the eastern portion of the territory. Leary also led in organizing a local gas company and Seattle's water system, and he served as president of both. Moving into journalism, he acquired the Seattle Post, merging it in 1882 with the Intelligencer to create the Post-Intelligencer, which remained more than a century later one of the city's two dailies. In 1883 he and Henry Yesler constructed the Yesler-Leary block, the finest business block in the city; it was destroyed in the great fire that swept through the business district in June 1889.

Throughout the 1880s Leary was a leader and major raiser of capital in Seattle's continuing efforts to secure rail links with transcontinental lines including routes to coal mines and across the Cascade Mountains. He was among the incorporators of the Baker City Railway (1882) and the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway (1884). Leary was also involved in local land development and in establishing mail service and general commerce with Alaska. He served as president of the Seattle Land and Improvement Company and the West Coast Improvement Company. In 1890, along with fellow entrepreneurs Thomas Burke and William R. Ballard, he developed the original site of Ballard, a mill town that was annexed to Seattle in 1907. His first wife died sometime around 1890. Leary was president of the Seattle Warehouse and Elevator Company and briefly of the First National Bank. He was on the board of directors of the West Street & North End Electric Railway and of the James Street & Broadway Cable and Electric Line. After acquiring the Bailey Gatzert, a steamer that plied Puget Sound waters, he organized the Columbia River and Puget Sound Navigation Company (1891), which built and operated steamers in the Northwest for many decades.

Leary served two terms on the city council and in 1884 was elected to a one-year term as mayor on a ticket organized by business interests to meet a challenge from the newly formed Law and Order League. Led by moralistic elements that included recently enfranchised women, the league sought to end political corruption and to enforce liquor and gambling laws; such actions, the businessmen feared, would interfere with the accustomed manner of conducting civic affairs. Politically conservative, Mayor Leary, in the view of contemporary historian Frederic James Grant (1891), "acted on the principle that property has its duties as well as rights, and that one of its prime duties is to aid and build up the community where the possessor has made his wealth." He converted the largely honorary, unpaid office of mayor to one of commitment and regular office hours; during his administration, major grading and paving of downtown waterfront streets were undertaken. Leary, however, had a falling out with his conservative supporters when he attempted to placate women's and reform groups by allowing raids on saloons and houses of prostitution. His reelection bid failed. In 1885-1886 mounting agitation against the city's Chinese population led to their expulsion. Leary was directly involved in these efforts, unsuccessfully urging the aliens to leave before violence occurred. He also served as president of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and of the prestigious Rainier Club and was a regent of the University of Washington. On 21 April 1892 he married Eliza P. Ferry, the daughter of Elisha P. Ferry, first governor of Washington State. The couple had no children. Running as a Republican in 1892, Leary was again defeated in a race for mayor.

During the last decade of his life he retired from business interests and was constructing the city's grandest mansion at the time of his death. In his later years, he wintered in southern California and was in Riverside when he died. He left an estate of $2 million.

Frederic James Grant wrote that John Leary's "very presence is stimulating. Buoyant and hopeful by nature, he imparts his own enthusiasm to those around him." Over three decades, while Seattle grew from a sawmill town of approximately 1,000 residents to the region's dominant city with over 80,000, Leary was involved in most of those civic and business enterprises essential for the burgeoning city.

Bibliography

Papers of John Leary and of Eliza Ferry Leary are in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. There is no full biography of Leary. The best of several short biographies is in Frederic James Grant, ed., History of Seattle, Washington with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (1891), pp. 457-60. See also Robert C. Nesbit, He Built Seattle: A Biography of Judge Thomas Burke (1961), and Margaret Pitcairn Strachan, "Early Day Mansions: No. 3--John Leary," Seattle Times magazine section, 17 Sept. 1944, p. 3. An extensive obituary is in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9 Feb. 1905.

Charles P. LeWarne

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