Authored by regional historian Robert L. Ferguson, The Pioneers of Lake View: A Guide to Seattle's Early Founders and Their Cemetery provides a compelling biographical and historical tour of Lake View Cemetery, the final resting place for many of the Emerald City's most prominent 19th-century figures. The book connects the physical monuments and headstones to the turbulent lives of the lumber barons, politicians, and ordinary settlers who laid the foundational infrastructure of frontier Seattle. Through meticulous research into pioneer genealogies, the text unearths the personal triumphs and tragedies hidden beneath manicured urban turf. A keen insight drawn from the work is how historic urban cemeteries function as subterranean archives of class stratification and civic myth-making; by examining who was granted prominent burial plots versus who was relegated to unmarked ground, the book reveals how city founders carefully engineered their own posthumous legacies to sanitize the brutal corporate ruthlessness of early Pacific Northwest capitalism.

119 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm