Named in 1923 after Ralph Bradbury Butterfield (1876-1944), whose little sister Edith (see Butterfield Road) was the wife of subdivider Ben Sheldon (see Cushdon Avenue). After a few years in Brookhaven, MS, Butterfield returned to his birthplace of Chicago to attend Northwestern University; he graduated in 1899, then married Cora Richardson in December of that year. (Coincidentally, Cora’s grandfather owned Glendale’s Santa Eulalia ranch.) The couple had four daughters but split after resettling in Mississippi, where Ralph was tasked with running the Butterfield Lumber Co. with his father and brothers. He wed second wife Felice Lee in Louisiana in 1915 but she died months later of an undisclosed illness. Cora herself would pass in Los Angeles in early 1919 – cause unknown – days after attending a party. She was 39. As for Ralph, he served as a machine gun officer in World War I, worked as an iron works foreman in San Francisco, went to Seattle and married third wife Alma Neidner, and was hired as an auditor for the U.S. Maritime Commission. This last gig took him and Alma to Argentina, where their only child Ralph Spencer Butterfield was born. The family eventually wound up in Seattle.
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