Arthur Armstrong Denny (June 20, 1822 – January 9, 1899) was an American politician and businessman who is regarded as one of the founders of Seattle, Washington.

[4] Denny was born near Salem, Indiana; by the time he was attending school his family had settled in Knox County, Illinois.

[1] His father, John Denny (1793–1875), fought in the western battles of the War of 1812[2] and later served in the Illinois state legislature, elected as a Whig.

(He eventually traveled west with the Denny Party, but stayed on in Oregon's Willamette River Valley when Arthur and several others moved north to Puget Sound.

He learned carpentry, taught school, studied surveying,[2] and became a civil engineer and Knox County surveyor starting in 1843.

The Denny Party relocated to the east shore of Elliott Bay, near what is now Pioneer Square, the original heart of what became the city of Seattle.

[12] Denny was an ascetic,[13] a devout Christian (conservative in his religion to the point of opposing a divorce law), and a lifelong teetotaler.

[2] Indeed, he was teetotal to the point where he had the customers of his store buy their liquor direct from visiting ship captains so that he would not be involved in the transactions.

In his memoir, recounting his failure in 1853 to reach agreement with David Swinson "Doc" Maynard over what was intended to be a joint plat of the town of Seattle, he wrote, "it was found that the doctor, who occasionally stimulated a little, had that day taken enough to cause him to feel that he was not only monarch of all he surveyed, but what Boren and I had surveyed as well.