When I was eleven years old, my favorite television show was Here Comes the Brides. For those who are unfamiliar, the show involved the Bolt brothers–Jason, Joshua and Jeremy (the cute one)–owners of a logging operation near Seattle. Their lumberjacks threaten to leave the area due to the lack of women, so they make a deal with the local sawmill owner. If he pays for 100 marriageable women to travel to the area, the Bolt brothers will guarantee that all will stay for one year. If the women don’t stay, then the sawmill owner will get the Bolt brother’s land and operation. The interesting thing is that this is loosely based on a true story.
Asa Mercer was born in Princeton, Illinois, the youngest of thirteen children. He traveled to Washington territory as a young teen in 1852, where his family became one of Seattle’s founding families. He returned to the Midwest to attend college, graduating from Franklin College in New Athens, Ohio in 1860. He then returned to the Seattle area, where he and his brothers cleared stumps to make room for the new territorial university. Since he was the only college graduate in the area, he was hired as the president
and sole instructor of the Territorial University of Washington, which would eventually become the University of Washington. He received no pay.
Lumber and fishing industries thrived in the area, leading to a lopsided gender balance–lots of men and few marriageable women. In 1864, financed by public and private funds, Asa Mercer traveled to Boston to find women willing to relocate to the Seattle area. He returned with eleven women, although The Seattle Gazette reported at the time that there were 50. Eight of these women became teachers in the area, and nine of them were quickly married. The two remaining women unfortunately passed away.
Mercer made another trip in 1865, partially funded by local lumber mill owner Hiram Burnett. He procured additional funds by charging local men a $300 fee for the transport of a future wife. After he arrived on the east coast, Mercer’s activities were written about in The New York Herald, which reported that the women he recruited were destined to marry poorly. Due to the bad publicity, he only managed to recruit 100 women instead of the 500 promised. And then there were difficulties getting to Seattle. The captain of the ship transporting the women refused to go farther than San Francisco. Eventually he convinced lumber schooners to transport the women for free and he (finally) arrived in Seattle with the brides-to-be.
Mercer himself married a Mercer Girl, Annie Stephens, a week after arriving in Seattle. It’s said that descendants of the Mercer Girls make up a significant number of native Seattlelites.
