Licton Springs Park is located in the Licton Springs neighborhood at 9536 Ashworth Ave N, 98103. It is 6.3 acres.
Licton Springs Park was an Olmsted-planned subdivision which included a central attraction of two mineral springs. The firm’s preliminary design from 1907 shows a centrally-located park, shaped roughly in an ellipse and ringed by a roadway, with housing lots directly fronting the roadway and park. A network of trails and interior roads wind through the park, and two pond areas are shown on the south and east sides of the park, with a stream channel connecting them. The organic layout of curving streets, homesites and rustic park was never fully realized, but today remnants of this scheme remain.
The springs were sacred to the Duwamish people. The surrounding land became a homestead and summer residence for David Denny’s family, up until his death in 1902. A subdivision was first developed in 1909-10 and heavily promoted to Seattleites as a way to “get away from the downtown dust and toil (the mineral springs were also quite popular), and from 1935-1960 a small spa was on the park site. In 1908, when Olmsted was working on Green Lake Boulevard, he suggested that the Park Commissioners might want to secure rights to the water from Licton Mineral Springs in order to maintain and control this fresh water supply to Green Lake. The city acquired the park in 1960 and developed it for public use in 1975.