House built: Before 1905
Plat Block: ?
Plat Lot: ?
1910 Address: 6817 10th Av Northeast
Current address: 68th and Roosevelt Way – house demolished, site now part of the Calvary Christian Assembly parking lot.
Delia Delight Dorrance was born in Pavilion Township, Kalamazoo County, Michigan in 1849 to Alfred, a farmer, and Lucinda (Stone) Dorrance. By the 1870 census, she, her older sister Mary, and her younger sister Esther were all schoolteachers. By 1880, she had left the family home and was teaching in Freesoil, Mason County, Michigan.
John Sylvester Pinney was born in Allegan County, Michigan, in 1864. The 1870 census finds a John Pinney, age 6, living with a family named Giligan. Because this census doesn’t ask for the relation of each person enumerated, it’s impossible to tell if he is a nephew, a boarder, or anything else that might help confirm his identity.
Delia and John met when Delia was “a bookkeeper in a Middle West office of the American Press Association”1. They were married on 3 August, 1885, in Delia’s home of Pavilion. Delia was 36. John was 21.
Their only child, Albert Dorrance Pinney, was born on 3 October, 1892, in St. Paul, MN, where John was manager of the American Press Association. At one time he also served as Secretary of both the Commercial Club and the Grand Army of the Republic Encampment association in St. Paul.
The family traveled extensively via John’s work, relocating at different times to Chicago, Boston, Omaha, St. Paul, Columbus and New York. The 1900 census shows the family living in Portland, OR. By 1906, they are in Seattle, and John is the local manager of the Seattle office of the American Type Founders Company.
In May of 1911, John sued Delia for divorce. He claimed in his suit that after Albert’s birth Delia “became morose and quarrelsome.”2 Delia, he claimed, “had been harassing him in his office, and that she had spoken to his employers of their domestic troubles. He had to move from place to place, from New York to Seattle, on that account.”3 When they moved to Seattle, said John, she even hired a janitor in the hotel where they were staying to watch John’s movements.4
Delia, who requested separate maintenance but did not want a divorce, responded that John had “…been trying for two years to get rid of her in his desire to associate with younger people.”5 “…their family life had been pleasant until recently, when her husband began to feel that she was too old.”6
That Delia suffered a measure of stress on account of their age difference seems plausible after glancing at the 1900 and 1910 census records. In 1900 we see a mistake: John’s birth year is shown as 1865 (it was 1864), Delia’s as 1860 (it was 1849). In the 1910 census, the age gap is shortened further: John is listed as 48 years old (he was 46), Delia as 51 (she was 61).
The judge refused John’s request for divorce and awarded Delia $12 per week as separate maintenance. Yet he eventually did obtain a divorce. By 1917, he and his second wife, Victoria, were living in San Francisco.
Life after John appears to have been a busy one for Delia. The 1915 and 1916 directories list her as a Manufacturers’ Agent, an obscurity made clear in an item in the July 24, 1916 issue of The Seattle Star: “Mrs. Delia Delight Pinney … a 67-year-old school girl at the University of Washington, sells stockings and underwear to the women students to pay her way thru school.”
Delia is shown in the house at 6817 10th Av Northeast in the 1920 census (with Albert) and the 1930 census (alone). She became involved in the local literary scene, founding the Seattle Chapter of the League of Western Writers, serving as secretary of the Seattle Verse Writers’ club, and being a member of the Seattle Poetry Club. She read her poetry at club meetings, wrote (but apparently did not publish) a book of children’s poetry in 1931, and was included in Washington Poets, an anthology of 59 contemporary state poets, published in 1932 by Henry Harrison, New York.
By February of 1939 she had moved to 2319 E. Madison on Capitol Hill. There, she wrote to the “Strolling Around The Town” column of The Seattle Times, of her “ambition to have a school organized for people who are more that 70 years old…” “Thus people, when old, would have something to look forward to and forget to worry about the end of life. And should one going out not have as cheerful thoughts as possible?”7
The 1940 census lists Delia as a “patient” at 2432 Harvard, a small convalescent home operated by Christie A. MacLean. She died there on 3 May, 1941, age 93.
The publication of another local poetry anthology, Evergreen Leaves, occasioned a reception at the Olympic Hotel. Dorothy Pinney, Delia’s granddaughter, read Delia’s contribution in her honor.
1 “Says Wife Nagged For Nineteen Years”, Seattle Sunday Times, May 21, 1911, page 15, column 2↩
2 ibid.↩
3 “Husband Refused Divorce, Seattle Star, November 8, 1911
↩
4 “Says Wife Nagged For Nineteen Years”↩
5 “Says Husband Wants to Get Rid of Her”, Seattle Daily Times, Tuesday Evening, May 23, 1911↩
6 “Says Wife Nagged For Nineteen Years”↩
7 “Strolling Around the Town”, Seattle Daily Times, February 6, 1939, page 13, column 2↩
Discovering the people of Seattle's Roosevelt neighborhood in the 1910 Census
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