With less than a week to go, backers of a community effort to raise funds to plan restoring Seattle’s historic Benson Trolleys for use on the city’s modern streetcar system are about halfway to their $28,000 goal. Though you’re unlikely to see Seattle’s two remaining 100-year-old trolleys on Capitol Hill’s tracks, the project has its roots in the neighborhood’s history.

“George and Evelyn Benson owned and operated Capitol Hill’s Mission Pharmacy at 19th and Aloha for 40 years,” Don Blakeney of Friends of the Benson Trolleys tells CHS. “Also, apparently they used to drive around the Hill delivering prescriptions to families in a van painted to look like a transit bus.”

George Benson eventually became a Seattle City Council member and is credited with the city’s acquisition of the vintage Melbourne, Australia streetcars in the early 1980s to ply the $3.3 million waterfront trolley line as part of Seattle’s efforts to begin revitalization along Elliott Bay.

After the line was shut down, the city sold off three of the old trolleys but agreed to hold two in storage pending a private effort to raise funding to return the old cars to service. With Seattle’s new Center City Connector route through downtown connecting the South Lake Union and First Hill lines now under construction and set to begin service in 2020, the effort to restore the cars is also moving forward.

The fundraising campaign seeks to raise $28,000 for a feasibility study to determine what it will take for the two old streetcars to be upgraded for the modern infrastructure:

Our goal is to have these cars running on the new line when it opens and if we are successful in this fundraising campaign, and the engineering feasibility study is successful, we would leverage this engineering work to immediately begin a second phase of the project. This second phase will include further fundraising for the physical restoration of the trolleys with their original dual-side loading, updated power systems as well as testing their existing systems, like the air brakes.

It’s unlikely the vintage trolleys will ever make it to Broadway, however. Heading from Pioneer Square to Broadway, the First Hill Streetcar operates on electrical power provided by a single overhead wire “which receives electricity provided by four traction power substations strategically located along the 2.5 mile route.” On the return trip downhill, however, hybrid batteries provide the streetcar’s power “generated through its regenerative braking along the inbound route, much of it downhill.” That would be a big change for the Benson trolleys.

Still, given the Benson family’s place in the neighborhood’s history, Capitol Hill supporters might decide to pitch in to help get the plan rolling.

“When you were a kid on Capitol Hill, you knew the Bensons kept an eye on you,” said former Capitol Hill kid and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels when George Benson passed away in 2004. “He always knew where he could find our parents.”

You can learn more about the Friends of the Benson Trolleys campaign and make a donation here.