House built: 1909
Cowen's University Park
Plat Block: 3
Plat Lot: 5
1910 address: 1407 E 63 St
Current address: 1407 NE 63rd St.
Edwin Aid Layton was born in 1873 in Concord, KY to Perry S. and Mary (Bartholomew) Layton. Perry, who was 64 at the time of Edwin's birth, was a physician. This was the career that Edwin chose for himself.
Jessie L. Trunkey was born in Illinois in 1875 to Jerome H. Trunkey, a coal merchant, and Mary Jane (Dewolf) Trunkey. Edwin and Jessie married in Chicago in 1895. The 1900 census shows the couple living with Jessie's parents in Chicago. Jessie was teaching and Edwin was practicing medicine.
Edwin heard the call to practice medicine in Africa. In late 1901, he and Jessie went to live in Bolengi, near Coquilhatville, in King Leopold II's infamous Congo Free State. There Jessie gave birth to their first child, Evelyn Lita. They remained through 1903.
In 1904, Edwin wrote: "My work as a medical missionary has taken me to all the villages round about and perhaps 100 miles into the interior," where he witnessed "victims of atrocious acts, cruelties, and oppression resulting from forced labor and an unjust taxation; undoubted signs of devastation and depopulation ..."1
"No philanthropic person," he wrote, "can be in Kongo without seeing and speaking of the really ruinous results of the present regime ... under my own observation two villages became wholly extinct."2
In November of 1904, Edwin, Jessie, and baby Evelyn travelled to China. There Jessie gave birth to daughter Mildred and son Clarence. The family remained in China until March of 1908. They returned to Chicago, and Jessie gave birth to Edwin jr.
The 1910 census lists Edwin and Jessie, ages 36 and 35; Evelyn, age 8 (we can hope she became best friends with Bernice Beal next door) , Mildred, age 5, Clarence, age 3, and Edwin jr. 1 year and 3 months. Edwin is renting the house. Arthur D. Trunkey, age 29, and Mary Trunkey, age 25 - Jessie's brother and sister - are living with the family. (Arthur is a underwriter with an insurance company.)
Edwin gave a number of lectures about his life in the Congo Free State. In one article, he is "credited with discovering the first case of the sleeping sickness, or negro lethargy, known to science. He is also said to have established the first schools, destroyed the power of the witch and baptized the first converts among the ten million Bankondo."3 He also lectured on "The Awakening of China".
In 1910, at the first Northwest Chautauqua Assembly, held on Whidbey Island, he shared the bill with "baseball evangelist" Billy Sunday. But most of his lectures seemed to have been quieter affairs at churches, or for the Seattle Business Girls Club (who met at the Good Eats Cafe).
In 1912, Edwin established a practice, Layton Trunkey & Trunkey, at 1422 E. 65th (demolished, and replaced by the original Rising Sun produce stand), and moved the family a block north to 6307 15th Avenue NE. By 1916, the family had relocated to Tacoma.
1 Seymour, Thomas, Memorial concerning conditions in the Independent state of the Kongo ...: praying that Congress investigate existing conditions in the Kongo state, and take steps to ameliorate and correct the evils from which that state is suffering, (Washington, D.C. : Govt. Print. Off., 1904), p. 31↩
2 Ibid., p. 32↩
3 "Dr. Edward A. Layton Plans Lecture Series", The Seattle Daily Times, February 8, 1913, p. 7, column 2↩
Discovering the people of Seattle's Roosevelt neighborhood in the 1910 Census
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