The Green Family in Seattle

The Green Family history in America stretches back to colonial days and took an abrupt turn during the Civil War. Joshua Green's great grandfather, John Green, came to America in pre-Revolutionary days. He became a successful Maryland druggist and a prominent government official.

John Green had three sons, Thomas, George, and Joshua. With the spirit of pioneers, the three set out from the Maryland family home in 1824, bound for Texas. Joshua and Thomas stopped long before reaching that goal, finding opportunity in Jackson, Mississippi, where they opened a drug store. They prospered and their business interests expanded to include a cotton mill and the J. and T. Green Bank, fully forty years before the first bank was opened in Seattle.

Joshua's son William Green married Bentonia Harrison, and a son, named Joshua, was born on October 16, 1869, in the former mansion of the governor of Mississippi. Finally, frustrated by his inability to rebuild the family business in bankrupt Jackson, William Green packed his suitcase in 1885 and went searching for a more encouraging environment. This he found on his journeys, and he came back to move his wife and two sons, Joshua and Hall, to Seattle.

William Green's family moved to Seattle in 1886, when Joshua was 17 years old. Joshua found jobs as a chainman on a surveying crew and as a purser on a sternwheel steamer known as the Henry Bailey, one of the historic mosquito fleet vessels that connected Seattle to settlements along the Canadian border. Anxious to own a business, Green persuaded three fellow officers of the Henry Bailey to become partners in a 100-foot sternwheel steamer called The Fanny Lake. The partners expanded their fleet, and created a side business of selling and delivering wholesale goods to customers in outlying towns. The firm was eventually named La Conner Trading and Transportation Co., with Joshua Green as president.


Mining the Gold Rush

During the Alaskan Gold Rush of 1897, Joshua Green instituted regular Seattle-Alaska ship runs to transport the thousands of prospectors anxious to make their way to the Klondike, and expanded the fleet. Both business moves were very profitable.

In 1913, Green founded the Puget Sound Navigation Co., a cross-Sound ferry service. However, the construction of paved highways caused many passengers to abandon the steamers for their own automobiles, and the new interurban Puget Sound Electric Railway moved people faster than Green's ships. He sold most of his shares in the company in 1926. In 1951, the firm was sold to the state of Washington for $5 million.

Banking

Joshua Green developed a new interest that would prove fortuitous: banking. In 1925, Green purchased Peoples Savings Bank, which had fallen on hard times, for $200,000. He changed the name to Peoples Bank and Trust Co. two years later. Because branch banking was not allowed at the time, the firm added First Avenue Bank as a wholly owned but independent subsidiary in 1929, followed in subsequent years by the acquisition of banks in Renton and North Seattle. The banks prospered. By 1949, when Green's son, Joshua Jr., was named president of the bank, it had deposits of $128 million and was serving 103,000 customers. By 1969, the year Joshua Green turned 100, deposits surged to $400 million.

Joshua Green died at age 105 in 1975. In 1988, U.S. Bancorp of Portland acquired Peoples Bank and renamed it U.S. Bank of Washington.

For more information, visit historylink.org.

 
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