RAVENNA’S ROOTS: Duwamish Lands to Modern Neighborhood
Home to many over the centuries, the neighborhood that is now called Ravenna has been inhabited for more than 10,000 years. The Native American Duwamish (before contact, the Dkhw’Duw’Absh, “the People of the Inside”) tribe of the Lushootseed (Skagit-Nisqually) Coast Salish nations prospered in the prominent village of SWAH-tsoo-gweel (“portage”) on then-adjacent Union Bay, with what is now Ravenna in their backyard prior to the loss of this land through colonization.
With the arrival of non-Native settlers, in 1887 Reverend Beck disembarked from the Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad (along what is now the Burke-Gilman Trail) and bought 300 forested acres called Ravenna. Both a township and a park, Ravenna’s placement of churches and other civic structures was modeled after the townsite’s namesake in Italy. The same year Beck bought Ravenna, he also established the Seattle Female College. Shortly thereafter came King County’s first grist mill, Ravenna Flouring Mill Company.
