The Remarkable Life Of Edith Macefield And The House That Stayed
We all love a David-and-Goliath type story and this one is a total humdinger. Playing the part of the brave underdog David in our tale is 85-year-old Edith Macefield, while the role of the overbearing bully Goliath falls to the Bridge Group development company. In contrast to the original Old Testament narrative — which reportedly took place around 3,000 years ago in ancient Judea — our story played out in Seattle, Washington, early in the 21st century.
Whitewood Cottage
This is a tale of a property developer which bought a city block in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. The company’s plan in 2006 was to demolish the existing buildings to replace them with a shopping mall and a parking lot: hardly an unusual occurrence in any modern American city.
But there was one problem: Edith Macefield’s modest 1,050-square-foot home, which had stood on its site since the year 1900. Macefield, who called her home Whitewood Cottage, had lived there since 1952 — the year she’d bought the property where she’d lived with her mother.
$1 million
Despite being offered as much as $1 million for her humble home, Macefield’s mind was made up: she would not move. So just who was this stubborn octogenarian? It turns out that she’d lived a very full life, and her story is well worth telling.
Originally called Doris Edith Wilson, she was born in the summer of 1921 to her parents Chester and Alice. But the truth is we don’t know a great deal about Macefield’s childhood.
A dependable narrator?
We do have some tales from her teenage years as told by Macefield herself, although how dependable a narrator she was is very much open to question. Many of the sometimes barely credible facts about her life come from Barry Martin.
He’s a construction manager who befriended Macefield in her later years. We’ll come back to the relationship between Martin and Macefield later; it became an important part of both their lives until Macefield’s death in 2008.
Never kissed
Writing on History Link, the self-styled “free online encyclopedia of Washington state history”, in 2015 Linda Holden Givens quotes extensively from the many tales that Macefield had told to Martin.
In one poignant tidbit, Macefield said that although she was “devoted” to her mother, she was never kissed by her. As you’ll see, other stories that Macefield recounted are bizarre to say the least: they stretch credibility right up to breaking point and arguably beyond.