Seattle’s First School Teacher Catharine Blaine

Few people buried in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery are as important in local and American history as Catharine Blaine. For someone who is credited with being Seattle’s first schoolteacher and whose full name appears on Magnolia’s Catharine Blaine School and whose last name marks Queen Anne’s Blaine Street, she only lived in Seattle for three years between 1853 and 1856. It is true that she and her husband David both died here, but between 1856 and the early 1880’s when they returned to Seattle, the Blaines lived in Oregon and on the East Coast. Catharine’s son Edwin published her letters home providing one of the earliest historical sources about the city’s founding period. Most dramatically, Catharine, who was born in Seneca Falls, N.Y., stands out as the youngest person to sign the “Declaration of Sentiment” written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and adopted at the famous 1848 Seneca Falls meeting which launched the women’s suffrage movement. She is certainly the only Seattle person to have signed! 

The Blaine family headstone looking north. Photo: Queen Anne Historical Society

The family may have purchased the tombstone when David Blaine died in 1900, but it was surely in place soon after Catharine’s passing in 1908. The tombstone is one of the largest at Mount Pleasant. Architecturally, little distinguishes this massive granite block which sports a gabled top whose classical scrolls embrace a capital letter B in a Gothic font.      

The Blaine plot was featured on Kim Turner’s August 26, 2023 tour of the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.