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We are grateful to a student researcher, L.S., for bringing the Dixon family to our attention. We have gleaned much from archival documents, census records, newspapers, and local books. We present here a story about the Dixon family who were among the first Black property owners and residents in Rainier Valley.
Roscoe Dixon is credited with being the first Black business owner in Astoria, Oregon. One hundred years later his youngest daughter, Theresa Dixon Flowers, donated Dixon and Flowers family photos to the Oregon Historical Society in 1984. The Biographical Notes included with the collection reference his birth in Virginia in the 1840s. After time in Portland and Astoria, Oregon; Victoria, B.C.; Dyea, Alaska and additional unknown elsewhere in between, the Roscoe Dixon family lived in the Brighton Beach neighborhood as early as 1908.
Roscoe Dixon and his younger brother Robert’s birthplace was Richmond, Virginia. By 1850 they, with their mother Agnes and George Lee, had escaped slavery there via the Underground Railroad to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where whaling ships fed the economy. Roscoe was seven and Robert was four years old. The Fugitive Slave Act, recently passed by the U.S Congress, threatened runaways with arrest and return to their enslavers in the South and the family was subject to this Act. Agnes Lee was still in residence in New Bedford when she wrote her last will and testament in 1885, though she had by then lost George to death. At some point in time, Robert and Roscoe Dixon had both headed west.
Roscoe worked in Portland, Oregon, as a “col., [colored] cook” (Polk’s Portland, Oregon, City Directory, 1874) and “oysterman” at the Gem Saloon at First and Stark. Roscoe soon established an oyster saloon in Astoria, where he offered “Fancy Roasts and Fried Oysters” for 35 cents and Boston Crystal Ice Cream. In 1880, Roscoe Dixon married Theresa Brown, a young woman originally from Macon, Georgia. The 1870 U.S. Census has 12-year old Theresa Brown as part of the household of a cooper (barrel maker) and his wife, in their 30s and white, living about 20 miles east of Astoria on the Columbia River. The Biographical Notes mention a sea captain that brought Theresa to Astoria around Cape Horn. She received training as a nurse in the area and provided private duty care and midwifery services into the 1920s. Her daughter Theresa was interviewed by Seattle historian Esther Hall Mumford in August 1979, when she recalled of her mother, “She worked for many years. I know times when she wouldn’t get home to stay for a year. She’d go from one case to another.” (Seattle’s Black Victorians 1852-1901, p. 130).
Roscoe’s brother, Robert Dixon had first arrived in Seattle in 1865; he gave cuts and shaves downtown on Columbia Street for nearly 50 years. In 1883 Robert, then in his 40s, married Rebecca Grose, daughter of well-known and successful Black entrepreneurs William and Sarah Grose. William Grose had purchased some 12 acres of land from Henry Yesler at East Madison and became the first Black property owner in the area. Over the years parcels were sold to other Black families ready to build their homes. This area formed the north end of today’s Central District.
Back in Astoria, Roscoe Dixon lost his oyster house business in about 1885. Daughter Theresa later attributed the failure to the railroad collapse—the transcontinental railroad had fallen short of reaching Astoria by a mere 58 miles. The town’s big dreams of expanding into a major port town to rival Portland had to be put on hold.
The Dixon family was growing and the children’s birthplaces trace their travels. Roscoe and Theresa’s son Chester Ingersoll Dixon was born in Astoria in November of 1882. First daughter, Christine Mabel, was born in Victoria, B.C. in November of 1885 and Theresa Virginia, in Seattle in December of 1894.
The Black population of Seattle’s four wards in 1890 was 286 of the nearly 43,000 total residents in the city (U.S. Census). Roscoe found work as janitor, conductor, grocer, waiter, cook, and steward that decade. In October of 1891, he was considered for a position as city hall janitor, but political concerns involving race were raised and the motion for the appointment failed (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer). This is the first mention of Roscoe Dixon in Seattle newspapers. He did eventually work for Seattle City Hall.
Other opportunities presented themselves. Robert Dixon and his brother-in-law George Grose became investors in the Seattle Klondike Grubstake and Trading Company in 1897. In a letter published in The Seattle Republican in June of 1898, the column “Alaskaites Write” mentions Roscoe Dixon’s plans to stay in Dyea for the summer and, if times got better, to move his family up. How this venture ultimately fared as the gold rush in Dyea soon fizzled is unknown.
Since arriving in Seattle, the Dixons had lived on 10th and 17th Avenues, on Washington Street, and various other locations. Mrs. Theresa Dixon signed the real estate contract for two lots in the Palace Garden replat of Tract 32 of Kelsey’s Brighton Beach Acre Tracts with a purchase price of $1,600 to be paid in $20 monthly increments in 1908. By the time Roscoe and Theresa Dixon settled in their Rainier Valley home with their daughters, their son Chester had been in the U.S. Navy for 11 years. As a teenager in Seattle, he had enlisted as apprentice boy and eventually served 37 years, a veteran of three wars. In 1920 Mr. Dixon was noted to be the only Black Chief torpedo man with permanent appointment (The Northwest Enterprise, 4/25/1945).
During an unusually cold and snowy January of 1916, Roscoe Dixon succumbed to heart disease at 72 years of age. Mrs. Dixon remained in the family home with daughter, Theresa, who was working as a nurse. After Mrs. Dixon’s death in 1927, Theresa Dixon remained living on 43rd Avenue South until about 1938, when she left for California to work at the Los Angeles County Tuberculosis Hospital. Sister Mabel returned to the family home until the 1940s while working at the King County Tuberculosis Hospital.
Early Black residents of the Pacific Northwest, the Dixons called Rainier Valley “home” for some 30 years. This family contributed to the health and well-being of Seattle residents from their arrival just prior to the financial panic of 1893 up until the Second World War with Chester’s military service and the women’s work in public and private health.
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