Alfaretta Van Valkenberg

Alfaretta Van Valkenberg's signature, 1869 (SCSU Archives)

Freeman plot, Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington (Find A Grave)

Alfaretta “Alfa” Van Valkenberg was born on February 1, 1852 to Samuel and Maria (Lockwood) Van Valkenberg in New York, where her father worked as a boatman. She was the second of their four children.

By the time Alfa entered the Third State Normal School in September 1869, her family had moved to Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Graduating with the school’s first class on June 30, 1871, she delivered a culminating essay titled “Self-Made Men,” in which she argued that individuals become “self-made” through fixed goals and learning from their experiences every day. At the end of the ceremony, she recalled years later, Alfa “turned and waved farewell to old familiar haunts....I felt all of life was open to me and I could tread paths with a firm and reliant tread.”

After graduating, Alfa taught in Minnesota schools. On March 31, 1880, she married Noah Martin Freeman, a pharmacist who had fought in the Civil War with Company B of the 37th Massachusetts Infantry. They made their home in Melrose, Minnesota, with his mother, Emily. By 1892, the three had moved to Seattle with Alfa and Noah’s three children: Pansy (1881), Hester (1883), and Leigh (1889). Alfa’s parents and her sister, Adelade, moved to the same neighborhood by 1900.

Noah passed away on October 18, 1904, and Alfa applied to receive his veteran’s pension the next month. Supported by his pension and income from renting rooms to boarders, Alfa and daughter Hester lived together in Seattle until Alfa’s death on May 24, 1937. She and Noah are buried in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle.