DIEU-DONNE SYLVESTER
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Among the early settlers to come to the Pasco area was Dieu-Donne Sylvester, an immigrant from Quebec Province, Canada, who had come to the United States and gained U.S. citizenship by fighting in the Civil War with the Minnesota Volunteers, after which he had gone to San Jose, California, to work as a blacksmith, where he married Margaret Nixon, an immigrant from Ireland. With his wife and three children he came to Ainsworth to work as a blacksmith on the N.P. bridge across the Snake River in 1879, traveling the whole distance by horse and buggy.
Sylvester filed on a 160-acre homestead in what is now the city of Pasco, and built a home, one of the first in Pasco. When he retired from railroad work in the late 1880’s he platted part of his homestead land as Sylvester’s First Addition to Pasco, the later having in the meantime been incorporated as a town. Later he platted Sylvester’s Second and Third Additions. In the plats he named some streets for Margaret, Nixon and Sylvester, in honor of his wife’s maiden name and for his father, respectively. He also named a street each for his seven children, Aurelia, Arthur, Ainsworth, Henry, Norbert, Octave, and Marie. Several years ago there was some agitation in town to make wholesale name changes on Pasco’s east-west street, with the idea of naming the streets alphabetically. However, due to the furor raised by the pioneers and by the citizens in general, that drastic plan was never adopted, as only the names of Lewis, Clark and Ainsworth would have survived. Then three or four years ago, under Mayor Don Linton, the Pasco City Council slipped through a name change which changed all of the north-south streets into numbered avenues, catching the public very much by surprise.
Though this change also raised considerable criticism, expressed in letters to the editor and at city council meetings the change stood. Lost, in this change were the Sylvester family names of Arthur, Aurelia, Francis and Norbert, which brought a critical letter to the editor from John Nixon Sylvester, a Seattle attorney and grandson of Dieu-Donne Sylvester, published in the TRI-CITY HERALD, in which he called attention to the above mentioned historical significance of those names, in addition, he mentioned that the Sylvester family had donated the land on which the Franklin County courthouse stands, and they also donated the land for Sylvester Park. In his letter, a copy of which was also sent to Mayor Jan Tidrick, he said, “It occurs to me that the Pasco City council has been somewhat ungrateful to the Sylvester family by changing the names of streets named after real pioneer people of Pasco.”
