Prosch family papers

Charles Prosch (1820-1913) was born in 1820 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to German immigrants, William Prosch and Christiana Dotter Prosch. In 1822, his family moved to a small farm close to New York City. Charles began to work in the offices of the New York Express newspaper in 1836, first as an apprentice and later as a journeyman. He married Susan Conkling (1824-1909) in 1846. (Historical records vary in spelling of her last name which is sometimes also written as Conklin in older records.) Conkling was born to Sylvester and Charity Reynolds Conkling in Monroe, New York and met Charles in New York City where she had been earning a living as a seamstress and tailor. Together, the couple had three sons, James (1846-1860), Frederick (1848-1901) and Thomas (1850-1915).

In 1852, Charles traveled from his family’s Brooklyn home to California where he helped publish the Alta California newspaper. Susan and their three sons followed in 1855, settling in San Francisco. While in San Francisco, Charles met Captain Lafayette Balch who owned a sawmill on Nisqually Bay and was eager to establish a newspaper in nearby Steilacoom to establish it as a town of significance and challenge Olympia’s position as the territorial capitol.

The Prosch family traveled to Steilacoom in February 1858 aboard the brig Cyrus and Charles began the Puget Sound Herald newspaper. According to Charles Prosch’s Reminiscences of Washington Territory: Scenes, Incidents and Reflections of the Pioneer Period on Puget Sound, the Herald was the first paper to report on gold in British Columbia’s Fraser River, leading to the Fraser River Gold Rush and providing a boost in earnings for the paper.

Around 1869, Charles and his sons Frederick and Thomas acquired the Pacific Tribune in Olympia. In 1872, Thomas Prosch took over the paper. In 1873, the family moved the Tribune to Tacoma when the town was named the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway. In 1875, Charles and Susan Prosch moved to Seattle along with their son Thomas. The Tribune came with them and was published briefly as the Daily Evening Tribune in Seattle until 1878.

In Seattle, the Prosch family became well known for a variety of contributions. Charles Prosch was one of 18 citizens to start St. Mark’s Church and became a member of the Washington Pioneers Association. Susan Conking Prosch was a founding member of Seattle’s Ladies Aid Relief Society (established in 1884), voted in the general elections of the 1880s before women had the vote taken away and served as a juror for several cases for the district court.

Their son, Thomas Prosch, earned a reputation as a journalist and historian who played a significant role in documenting the early history of Washington State. In 1877, Prosch married Virginia McCarver (1851-1915), the daughter of two of Tacoma’s founders, Morton and Julia Ann McCarver. The couple had five children, Julia (1878-1879), Arthur (1882-1953), Edith (1880-1937), Genevieve (1884-1904), Beatrice (1886-1916), and Phoebe (1888-1970).

In 1879, Thomas Prosch purchased the Seattle paper, the Intelligencer, with Samuel L. Crawford. Prosch joined with George W. Harris and John Leary in 1881 to create the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Prosch assumed full ownership of the paper in 1884 before selling it in 1886. Charles Prosch also worked at the Intelligencer until the age of 75. From 1900 until the time of Thomas’s death, the family lived at 621 9th Ave. on First Hill.

Along with his endeavors in journalism, Thomas Prosch took on many other roles in Seattle. He was appointed the city’s postmaster by President Ulysses Grant from 1876 to 1878, was on the Seattle Board of Education from 1891 to 1893 and was an active member of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, helping to coordinate the city’s recovery from the Great Fire of 1889.

Thomas Prosch took great interest in documenting the history of Seattle and the Puget Sound region. He published several books on the McCarver, Prosch, Maynard and Blaine families and authored a chronological history of Seattle which was published posthumously in the 1930s as part of a Works Progress Administration project. Prosch also took photographs of the city which he captioned and bound into scrapbooks, developed a dictionary of Chinook jargon, and contributed many articles to the Washington Historical Quarterly including a recurring column called “The Pioneer Dead.”

The lives of Thomas and Virginia Prosch were cut short prematurely when they died in an automobile accident while traveling to Tacoma. Margaret Lenora Denny (1847-1915) and artist Harriet Foster Beecher (1854-1915) also died in the accident.

Edith Prosch took over her father’s Washington Historical Quarterly column following his passing at the request of Edmond Meany. Her first article memorialized her parents. Edith’s sister Beatrice died in 1916 following years of illness because of tuberculosis. Edith was subsequently also diagnosed with tuberculosis and died by suicide in 1937 following years in and out of sanitariums to treat her declining health. This left Phoebe and Arthur as the only remaining living Prosch siblings.