Group pays homage to Seattle foremother
SEATTLE – A local men’s group that traces its history back to Gold Rush days made time this past weekend to honor Mary Ann Conklin, an imposing woman and Seattle pioneer they say should be remembered, despite having run the town brothel.
There are no loving reminiscences of this pioneer, known as Mother Damnable, who swore often and carried rocks in her apron to throw at people who irked her. On the top floor of the hotel she managed, she was said to run a brothel.
A fraternal group known as the Clampers says the city shouldn’t forget about Mother Damnable Conklin, because characters like her are as important to the city’s history as the pioneers after whom the streets and buildings are named.
“They fade off into the mist unless we bring them to people’s attention,” said Dan Kerege, a tugboat dispatcher who is head of the Seattle Clampers society.
Standing around her gravesite at Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill this past week, Kerege and other Clampers told stories about Mother Damnable.
Conklin merited prominent mention in the memoirs of Navy Rear Admiral Thomas S. Phelps when he wrote about serving on the sloop-of-war U.S.S. Decatur in Seattle from 1855 to 1856.
Besides taking part in the one-day “Battle of Seattle” on Jan. 26, 1856, against American Indians, the sailors also were building roads and burning bushes to eliminate any hiding spots.
The problem was that Mother Damnable didn’t want bushes around her hotel burned. Her whorehouse, wrote the late historian Bill Speidel, “hinged on privacy. … And if the United States Navy burned down the bushes, they burned up her customers.”
In his memoirs, Phelps wrote “… the moment our men appeared upon the scene, with three dogs at her heels, and an apron filled with rocks, this termagant would come tearing out of the house, and the way stones, oaths, and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate, and, charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth in the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way. …”
Mother Damnable was born in 1821. She died in 1873, although her gravestone lists the year incorrectly as 1887. There is no mention of her having any children.
About a decade and a half after she died, the cemetery she was first buried in was turned into a park, so she was reburied in Lake View Cemetery.
As the story goes, workers were surprised at how much the casket weighed, and found she had turned to stone.
But Peter Lape, curator of archaeology at the Burke Museum, said calcification isn’t likely in Seattle soils. If it ever were to happen, it would take several hundred years, if not a thousand years.
“Sounds like a tall tale, but a very good one,” he said.
That some of the stories around Mother Damnable can’t be verified doesn’t matter to Kerege.
“We definitely have a shortage of colorful characters these days,” he said. “We’ve got to hang on to what we’ve got.”