Queen Anne Fortnightly Club

On a September afternoon in 1894, in a house on the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Prospect Street, twelve women gathered in a parlor and decided to change their lives.

They were neighbors on Queen Anne Hill — a steep, forested ridge rising 457 feet above Puget Sound in a city barely forty years old. Seattle was booming. Electric streetcar lines were climbing the hills. Wooden homes in the Queen Anne style were appearing among the stumps of old-growth forest. The air smelled of sawmills and salt water and ambition.

But for women like Anna J. Sheafe, the founder, something was missing. She couldn't vote. She had no university degree. The avenues of public intellectual life were largely closed to her. So she did what thousands of American women were doing at the turn of the century — she organized. She walked the unpaved streets of Queen Anne Hill, knocked on doors, and asked her neighbors a simple question: Would you like to learn together?

Eleven women said yes.

They called themselves the Queen Anne Fortnightly Club — "fortnightly" because they would meet every two weeks, in each other's homes, from September through June. Each year they would choose a theme. Each member would research and write an original paper. They would present their work to each other, discuss it, and in the process become scholars of their own making.

That was 1894. They are still meeting today.

"Born Sept. 20th"

The club's first great chronicler was Carrie K. Pike, who lived on Warren Avenue and attended meetings for decades. In 1904, Pike wrote a history of the club's first ten years — but she did it as only she could, personifying the Fortnightly as a growing child:

"Born Sept. 20th. Weight — 12 members with comely faces and good healthy brains. Mother, in whose home I was born, has borne up admirably under the stress, anxiety, and responsibility attending the event."

She chronicled each year as if reporting on the child's growth. The club "gained rapidly in weight — having 22 members." It got its first "real dress — in the form of a year-book — having previously worn only slips (programs typewritten on slips of paper). The new dress is of white checked material tied with pink baby ribbon." By the end of its first year, this precocious infant had "learned to walk and taken exercise regularly" — in the form of long intellectual walks "among the places visited during the year: Greece, Rome, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, Iceland, and home again." Pike added drily: "I heard someone say I had taken rather strenuous exercise for one so young!"

Pink and green became the club colors. Annual dues were twenty-five cents. The first yearbook cost eight dollars. And every year, the women studied — a century of history per year, then individual countries, then themes that grew more ambitious and more personal as the decades passed.

More Than a Literary Society

Sheafe led the club for its first thirteen years, and when six charter members wrote its early history in 1907, they reflected with pride on what these "afternoons among neighbors" had become. The club had not merely studied the world — it had acted on it.

In 1899, member Sophia Crockett stood before the club and described the appalling fact that Seattle had no ambulance. She took the matter to the City Federation. The lobbying was slow. But the Fortnightly funded Seattle's first ambulance that summer. In 1901, the women organized a traveling library car called "The Fortnightly," which carried books to remote logging camps in the region.

Their most enduring civic legacy came in 1907, when member Anna Herr Clise — grieving her five-year-old son Willis, who had died of inflammatory rheumatism — researched the lack of children's medical care in Seattle and founded Children's Orthopedic Hospital with fellow members Harriet Stimson and Nettie Black. Clise organized a 23-woman board and established hospital guilds across Seattle neighborhoods, starting with Queen Anne. Those guilds grew into a statewide network that still supports Seattle Children's Hospital today.

These were women who studied the world and then went out and changed their corner of it.

The Warmth of the Circle

But the Fortnightly was never only about civic achievement. At its heart, it was about friendship — the particular, sustaining kind that comes from decades of sharing a room, sharing ideas, and sharing life.

Mary Sackett, recalling the club's early social events in 1904, remembered their first attempt at public speaking:

"From the most timid, to the bravest, each one did her part in great style… After ten years have rolled by, that first effort of our little club at entertaining our friends seems to me to merit the applause it received."

She remembered the club's first banquet for their husbands — the long table stretching through both of Anna Sheafe's parlors, decorated with ferns and pink ribbon and carnations, "brilliant with much cut-glass, silver, and candelabra." Sheafe was toastmaster, and the women gave formal toasts. When Sackett's turn came to respond to "The Future of the Fortnightly," she confessed she "was so cold and shaky — I felt as if I was taking a chill and whispered to Mrs. Sheafe to have my coffee served me before my turn." She added: "I am glad to say the chill was a false alarm."

Eighty-four years later, Marion Christoffersen shared her own memories as a 50-year member. She recalled her terror before her first paper — the theme was Scandinavia, her subject Swedish poetry — and the discovery that saved her: "I was scared pink but after that first time it was always easy to speak before this group. After all we were all friends and the warmth and I guess empathy was evident even then."

Christoffersen remembered Margretta Hillman opening the 1940 club year with a paper called "Fun Is Where You Find It," then leading the group in singing "Three Blind Mice" in rounds "until we all were in giggles." She remembered lovely Mrs. Carlson, "who sometimes wore real flowers in her hat." She remembered the simple rituals — the roll calls where each member would share a poem, a joke, a favorite flower, or the story of when she came to Seattle.

"What kind of club are we?" she asked. "I don't know, maybe a Ladies Literary Society. One husband called us a Study Club. Any way we are unique and wonderful."

What They Wrote About

The archive holds 559 papers spanning 130 years, and their range is breathtaking. These women wrote about whatever captured their curiosity — and nothing was off limits.

In the early decades, they studied history systematically: a century per year, then entire countries. By mid-century, Margaret Gray presented a detailed history of their own neighborhood — how Thomas Mercer had to cut through dense forest in 1853 to build his cabin, how the hill was first called Eden Hill, how Rev. Damon became "The Marrying Parson," how George Kinnear donated the fourteen acres that became Kinnear Park. Her 1959 paper is now one of the richest documents of Queen Anne Hill history in existence.

In 1978, Jean Botzer marveled at Queen Anne real estate prices — a shack with no real bathroom selling for $26,000 cash, a view home going for $136,000 — and asked a question that still resonates: "How many residential areas in large cities can be so surrounded by views of mountains, water, city views and yet be 10 to 15 minutes from the heart of the financial center?"

The subjects multiplied across the decades: Russia, China, Japan, Ethiopia, Swaziland. The Galapagos Islands. Immigration. Mozart. The sea. Fairy tales from six cultures. Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Margaret Thatcher and Cleopatra. Jane Goodall and Marilyn Monroe. The Gates Foundation's work on hunger. Amazon. Climate change. Homelessness. Yoga. Dowsing. The history of pots and pans.

And some of the papers are wonderfully, deliciously unexpected. Pam Thackeray's 2012 paper on Women Pioneers in the Early West uncovers the story of Seattle's 2,000 "seamstresses" — ladies of the night living within three blocks of Pioneer Square, including the magnificent Lou Graham, "five feet tall and three feet thick," who entertained Seattle's city government for free and whose estate went to fund public schools. Thackeray also tells the heartbreaking true story of Helga Estby, who walked from Seattle to New York in 1896 to win a $10,000 bet to save her farm — only to have the sponsor renege, and return home to find two of her children dead of diphtheria. "A woman's duty was still to tend to the home," Thackeray wrote, "and let the men worry about the finances."

Gretchen Krom's paper on Jane Goodall reveals that Goodall and her second husband both divorced their spouses to marry each other. Marguerite Sander's paper on Cosima Wagner traces the secret love affair between Liszt's daughter and Wagner while she was still married. And Margie Bruns' account of her 2012 trip to Colombia arrives just as the Secret Service scandal was breaking — "not getting press coverage here," she noted drily.

Through world wars, the Depression, the Cold War, the digital revolution, and a pandemic, these women kept meeting, kept researching, kept presenting. When COVID forced them onto Zoom, they adapted — because the tradition was bigger than any one room.

A Letter from Far Away

Perhaps nothing captures the depth of the Fortnightly bond better than a letter read aloud at a 1988 meeting. Margaret Siegley, a longtime associate member who had moved away, wrote to the club:

"It was to your home that Mary Cunningham took me, as a guest, so many years ago. It was a delightful afternoon. I was so impressed by the warmth and, what seemed to me to be a depth of friendship among the women. Little did I know that I was being carefully 'looked over' and considered as a member. I was completely astonished when I received the invitation to become a member."

She enclosed her overdue dues — decades late — along with a gift for the treasury and a wish: "My fondest wish is that I could be in Seattle on a meeting day and so attend one more meeting. Oh, well… one can dream."

Christoffersen, reading the letter to the group, reflected: "It is so that our attachment to Fortnightly lingers on."

Still Going

As of its 130th year, the Queen Anne Fortnightly Club has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the transformation of its neighborhood from farmland to one of Seattle's most coveted addresses, and a global pandemic. It has funded ambulances and hospitals, sent books to logging camps, and produced a body of original research — 559 papers and counting — that collectively forms an extraordinary record of what American women were thinking about, decade after decade, in a single neighborhood on a hill above Puget Sound.

Carrie Pike, writing in 1911, named the qualities she believed had sustained the club through its first seventeen years: "Loyalty, promptness, regularity, conscientiousness, enthusiasm, sympathy, and affection." She called the bond between members "this sweet spirit of sisterliness," and observed that it grew "dearer with the vicissitudes of the passing days and years."

That spirit endures. The meetings are still held in Queen Anne homes. The papers are still original research. And the women still gather, every two weeks, to do what Anna Sheafe first proposed in a parlor in 1894: to learn together, and in learning, to lift each other up.

This archive contains over one million words of original scholarship by 139 women across 130 years. If you know someone who would be inspired by these stories — a daughter, a friend, a neighbor on Queen Anne Hill — please share this page. These women's voices deserve to be heard.

Read the full history, timeline & neighborhood story →   ·   Browse all 559 papers →