Alanson, Elhanan, and Hyrcanus Blackman were born in Bradley, a town named for their grandfather. After he took over Leonard's Mill on Nicolas Stream in 1828, the family's milling business prospered so greatly over the next 50 years that the stream itself became known as Blackman Stream, a name it still bears, though the mill was rebuilt in the 1980s by the Maine Forest and Logging Museum. By the 1870s, however, the Blackman Mill was evidently failing financially, and the three brothers, their wives, and one infant migrated to the Pacific Northwest, arriving in 1872 at Port Gamble on Washington Territory's Kitsap Peninsula, where a busy logging operation founded in the mid-1800s by three men from Maine was already under way. Although no records explain why they left Port Gamble for Snohomish, the recently platted settlement on the Snohomish River, 12 miles upriver from Port Gardner, later the site of Everett, became their new home. There the brothers built one another's houses on Avenue B with the first milled lumber from the local Ferguson-Morgan Mill and, as Blackman Bros., began logging on the local lake then called Stillaguamish and now known as Blackman Lake. Within four years, their first mill on the Snohomish River was operating and employed ten men. The Blackman House at 118 Avenue B, built in 1878, is the only one of the three brothers' homes to survive; there Hyrcanus and Ella Blackman raised their son Clifford and daughter Eunice, and Eunice later remained in the house with her family, the Fords, until 1969, when it was sold to the Snohomish Historical Society.