Asa Shinn Mercer was a Seattle educator who had arranged an earlier trip for unmarried women to Washington Territory on behalf of single men who provided the funding. The second trip left New York with only a fraction of the promised four hundred single women aboard. After a troubled journey the emigrants arrived in Seattle in May 1866 and soon found spouses. Mercer himself married one of his "Mercer Girls." (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
"Washington Territory" in Mary Ellen Snodgrass (ed.), The Civil War Era and Reconstruction: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History (New York; Routledge, 2015), 645.
Record Data
Date Certainty
Exact
Type
Settlers/Immigrants
