Denny was born in Putnam County, Illinois. With what would become known as the Denny Party—named after Denny\'s older brother Arthur Denny—he traveled west by covered wagon in 1851 to Oregon. Along with John Low and Lee Terry, he traveled by boat to the future site of Seattle, arriving September 25, 1851. As Low went to reconnoiter with the rest of the group, and Lee Terry headed south on Puget Sound in search of tools, David Denny—too young at this time to stake a land claim in his own right—was briefly left as the sole member of the group at Alki in what is now West Seattle.\n', '

On January 23, 1853 he married his stepsister Louisa Boren, also a member of the Denny Party, in a civil ceremony performed by "Doc" Maynard, the city\'s first non-Indian wedding; they were to have eight children, including Emily Inez Denny. He proved to be adept at languages, and (unlike some of the settlers) maintained generally good relations with the natives of the area.\n', '

The Dennys\' 1853 land claim—640 acres (2.6 km2), standard for a married couple—ran from what is now the Seattle Center grounds (the area where they first settled) east to South Lake Union; its south boundary was present-day Denny Way. In 1882, the Lake Union and Lumber Company established a sawmill (the city\'s largest) on this land near the southwest corner of Lake Union; Denny bought the mill in 1884, renaming it the Western Mill. The following year, he cut a weir from Portage Bay at the northeast corner of the lake to Lake Washington. This allowed logs to be floated from that larger lake to Lake Union, so that the entire area of Lake Washington became a catchment for his mill. Denny operated the Western Mill until 1895; his employees and their families were among the first settlers of the South Lake Union area.\n', '

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