This West Seattle street was created in 1911 as part of the plat of Fauntleroy, an Addition to Seattle, and named for the nearby Brace Point.
According to HistoryLink.org, Brace Point was itself named in 1841 by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition, otherwise known as the Wilkes Expedition. However, according to Edmond S. Meany’s Origin of Washington Geographic Names, it was named in 1857 by the United States Coast Survey. (Its first appearance in the Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey was the 1862 edition, which said its name was given in 1856.) I am going to go with Professor Meany and the Coast Survey on this one.
There does not appear to be any record of why Brace Point was so named. George Davidson (1825–1911) was a member of the Coast Survey in 1857, and as he explored Puget Sound named Fauntleroy Cove, Mount Ellinor, and Mount Constance (see Fauntleroy Way SW). Having named these as well as the twin Olympic Mountains peaks The Brothers after Robert Henry Fauntleroy (1806–1849) and his family, perhaps Brace was a name somehow associated with that family or his own? (They became one and the same, as Davidson married Ellinor Fauntleroy [1837–1907] in 1858.) Or, brace is a nautical term: “on a square-rigged ship… a rope (line) used to rotate a yard around the mast, to allow the ship to sail at different angles to the wind,” which could have been reason enough for a member of the Coast Survey to apply it to a landmark. As of this writing it remains a mystery.
SW Brace Point Drive begins at California Avenue SW as it passes Kilbourne Park. It goes just over ⅓ of a mile first southwest, then northwest (changing direction at 47th Avenue SW), to a shoreline street end on Puget Sound, seen below. (Ordinance 72001 seems to indicate that the beach portion of the street end was added in 1942.)
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.