Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 1 of 179)

The Steel Head of Meaning

October 3, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Just before Christmas 1929, Quinault tribal fishermen pulled winter steelhead out of the Quinault River on their reservation. They harvested about 1,724 pounds of fish, iced them at Taholah, and packed them into fourteen large wooden boxes, each weighing over 120 pounds.

Someone stenciled an address on the outside of every box: New England Fish Company, New York City. Ironically, because New York City is not in New England.

Pioneer Packing Company, a fish dealer out of Aberdeen, bought the nearly ton of fish on the reservation, a detail that turned out to be crucial. Pioneer hired Star Transfer Company to haul the boxes 40 miles down to the express shipping office in Aberdeen. From there, they’d start the long journey east.

The steelhead made it as far as the express office. Jack Winslow, the Grays Harbor County game warden, was waiting. He seized all fourteen crates on the spot.

Winslow pointed to Washington state game laws, which banned selling or transporting river-caught steelhead for money. The state considered steelhead caught in rivers to be “game fish,” which meant they were for sportsmen only. These fish were bought for profit and headed across state lines.

To see why a county warden felt empowered to arrest the travel of gamefish in a public shipping office, we have to go back a few years. We need to look at when steelhead stopped being seen as everyday food.

Before the 1920s, when local papers wrote about steelhead, they listed a price per pound, along with clams and oysters. The fish was simply a market commodity, processed by canneries and harvested by non-Native netters and tribal fishermen.

Things shifted after World War I. A growing middle class had spare time and money for gear. Some began viewing steelhead primarily as sport rather than dinner. Anglers are different from other fishermen because they “angle.” If I were explaining this to you in person, I would move my arm up and down, bending at the elbow to create a corner. These anglers started organizing in the 1920s. They wanted steelhead separated from commercial fisheries and reclassified as a “game” fish.

If you ask steelhead anglers why they’re obsessed, they’ll give you a quick answer. The fish gets built in the open ocean. It pulls hard and leaps when hooked. Catching one means reading river currents and casting for hours in freezing rain. One bite makes the misery worth it.

And this is all different from other river-born, ocean-raised fish in the Pacific salmon universe.

While I have thought hard about the differences between Chinook and steelhead, I have come to understand it’s all subjective. You’ll have to take their word for it.

The name “steelhead” itself also stands out. Even compared to Chinook or sockeye, “steelhead” sounds tough. Commercial crews gave them the name because their heads were hard to knock out on deck.

By the 1920s, the fish were also actually disappearing. Logging stripped watersheds, and dams blocked rivers. Upper-middle-class sportsmen also held real political power. They pushed for state laws that favored recreation over commercial harvests to preserve their share of the shrinking pie.

In 1925, the state legislature passed a compromise. They named steelhead a game fish, but only upstream from river mouths. Estuaries and saltwater stayed open to commercial fishermen. Sportsmen wanted a full ban, so they kept pushing.

Three years later, in January 1928, anglers met at the Wilsonian Hotel in Seattle. They formed the Steelhead Trout Club of Washington. Their goals were straightforward: end commercial netting, ban river traps, and replace county wardens with one central state agency.

Maybe Jack Winslow, a county game warden, saw the writing on the wall and decided to show just how pro-gamefish a county game warden could be. That was the world he worked in when the boxes showed up in Aberdeen.

Pioneer Packing sued. Pioneer Packing Company v. Jack Winslow landed in county court in early 1930. Pioneer asked for a permanent court order to stop the warden from seizing fish bought on the reservation.

Lawyers for the Quinault Nation backed Pioneer. They argued that the Treaty of Olympia and federal precedent left the state zero power over tribal fisheries inside reservation borders.

The judge ruled for Pioneer Packing and granted the order. Winslow couldn’t touch the shipment.

But state officials refused to back down on regulating commercial fish shipments. Winslow appealed to the Washington Supreme Court.

The case turned on two points:

Did the Quinault own the fish in their rivers, or did the state own them for all citizens?

Did the federal Commerce Clause protect selling reservation fish across state lines?

On December 29, 1930, over a year after the steelhead left the river, the state Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision upholding the order against Winslow. The court pointed to the Treaty of 1855 and an 1873 Executive Order. Under those agreements, the Quinault owned the fish by original title. The state had no right to interfere with fishing on the reservation.

The second point followed naturally. Since the Quinault owned the fish, selling them for shipment to New York was federal interstate commerce, far beyond state game laws.

A Washington court had just protected the commercial sale of steelhead and affirmed treaty rights. Even narrowly, this is not necessarily the history we understand of that era. Few now expect state courts to respect treaty rights in 1930. Standard histories tend to skip from the 1905 Winans case straight to the 1950s, where I will pick up in a second.

History is not a straight line. There are a lot of starts and stops, false dawns, in history. And, a lot happened during those missing decades we don’t normally talk about. Sitting in early 1930, no one knew how the next few decades were going to unfold, or if the 14 boxes of steelhead case would lead anywhere other than the bare facts of the case.

Sometimes, what seems like a major turning point ends up being a forgettable bump.

For example, in 1915, Olympia lawyer E.N. Steele set up what he thought would be a test case to settle tribal rights. He was even able to team up with federal prosecutors to use the prosecution of two tribal members for illegal hunting. Steele told his clients to plead guilty so he and the U.S. Attorney’s Office could appeal straight to federal court.

It had been practice for local officials to arrest tribal hunters and fishermen, but for the courts to drop cases before prosecution. Enough effort to cause havoc for tribal members, but not enough that they would actually have to settle what the treaties meant.

But as the cases proceeded, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Becker, ruling that state game laws applied to tribal hunters off reservations. That ruined Steele’s strategy. His clients had been cited for hunting, so his legal test collapsed.

Steele dropped the cases. Local officials declared victory, and Steele walked away from treaty litigation for good.

Decades later, the Boldt decision proved Steele’s core arguments right. If his 1915 test case had succeeded, Pacific Northwest history might have changed sixty years earlier. History is never a straight line. We never know how we’re going to end up where we go.

Two years after the 1930 ruling, voters passed Initiative 62. It created the Washington Department of Game, separating it from the more commercial-focused Department of Fisheries. Game immediately banned taking, holding, or selling steelhead statewide.

It is worth looping back to point out that during this post-World War I era, angling groups also weaponized nativist sentiment against non-tribal commercial fishing. As xenophobia culminated in restrictive federal immigration laws, sportsmen’s organizations routinely targeted the Greek, Italian, Slavic, and Scandinavian immigrants who gillnetted and worked in canneries. Anglers framed netters not just as competitors for fish, but as un-American, greedy exploiters who used uncivilized techniques to strip public waters for private profit. On the other hand, rod-and-reel angling was romanticized as a noble, patriotic pastime rooted in traditional American sportsmanship.

Supporters pitched the campaign around conservation, but the result was a sport-angling monopoly on steelhead. By outlawing nets and trade, the state turned treaty-protected fishing and otherwise legal food harvesting into illegal poaching, setting up decades of conflict.

The state Supreme Court wavered on the point of state authority over tribal fishing for decades. In 1957, State v. Satiacum ended in a split vote, leaving state authority over treaty fishing in limbo.

Then, in the 1960s, the court reversed course and started driving hard against treaty rights. In 1963 and 1967, judges ruled that the state could enforce conservation rules on treaty fishermen off the reservation. They treated treaty rights as privileges subject to state regulation, ignoring supreme federal law.

History is not a straight line. If that court hadn’t pushed so hard against treaty rights, would tribes and federal authorities have fought back hard enough to force the Boldt decision?

Arrests and net seizures sparked the Fish Wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Treaty activists organized fish-ins and civil disobedience. The state court clashed directly with federal treaty law, forcing the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene.

That led to United States v. Washington. In 1974, Judge George Boldt ruled that tribes were co-managers entitled to half of the harvestable catch, which is well beyond where anyone thought a treaty fishing rights case would end up. By pushing hard, they nearly lost everything. When state judges tried to block compliance, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and affirmed that federal treaties overrule state law.

State overreach triggered federal intervention. The state court’s push to criminalize tribal fishing ultimately created the framework for modern tribal co-management.

If you want to see how far the state’s side of the argument went, look at Slade Gorton.

As attorney general, Gorton treated tribes as if they lacked sovereign power. He argued federal dominance left no room for tribal government, so he dismissed treaty rights outright.

That view drove his repeated efforts to overturn federal mandates and strip tribes of law enforcement authority on their own land.

In 1984, voters passed Initiative 456. It declared that natural resource management belonged to the state alone, claimed off-reservation treaty rights were void, and asked Congress to name steelhead a game fish.

1984 turned out to be the high water mark of the steelhead-as-gamefish world.

Five years later, scientists pulled at the thread from another direction and reclassified steelhead. They moved rainbow trout and steelhead out of the Atlantic trout genus Salmo and into Oncorhynchus, the Pacific salmon genus. The scientific name became Oncorhynchus mykiss.

For over a century, European taxonomists grouped steelhead with brown trout based on one trait. Steelhead can survive spawning and run multiple times, whereas other Pacific salmon spawn once and die.

Researchers Gerald Smith and Ralph Stearley changed that. Using early computers to analyze bone structures and body traits, they showed steelhead share a direct lineage with Pacific salmon.

DNA testing confirmed those findings. Rainbow trout and steelhead are closer relatives to pink and chum than to Atlantic salmon. The evidence was undeniable.

Taxonomy relies on objective genetics and physical traits. Yet this reclassification caused an uproar because it collided with old cultural assumptions.

Fly anglers hated the change. Traditional fly fishing prized trout for delicate tactics and catch-and-release ethics, while salmon meant commercial nets and food harvest. Calling the prized game fish a salmon felt like a step down to them.

Look at how we think about these fish. Pacific salmon return in massive, predictable runs, making them an ideal food source. Steelhead show up in smaller, scattered numbers. We placed them on a pedestal as a romantic, solitary sport fish.

When people discuss connecting with nature, they often dismiss commercial fishing. But we don’t think about the manner in which all of us can access the food the rivers provide.

We don’t say “commercial teaching” or “commercial carpentry.” We accept work as a normal way people earn a living. We rarely even say “commercial farming” either, since growing food is simply how we feed communities and accepting money for labor is a no-brainer.

Few people catch wild food for fun. Sport fishing is fine on its own, but prioritizing recreation over food production for whole communities pushes a false story about “game fish.” Fishing has always been something people have done to provide a means of support for themselves, their families, and their communities. There is dignity in labor, and fishing is labor and fish are food.

The fish in those fourteen wooden boxes were Oncorhynchus mykiss. They were always salmon. And they were always food. They were traded and harvested for generations before European settlement and currency-based economics. Steelhead were always part of a regional economic system.

Nobody in Aberdeen in 1929 called them mykiss. Back then, official records called them Salmo gairdneri. This set up decades of battles over words and what they mean.

The movement to turn steelhead into a protected game fish, literally the words we choose to describe an animal, created a false split between sport angling and harvesting fish to feed families. State agencies tried to dismiss treaty economies that relied on salmon for livelihood and food. Court decisions and genetic research eventually confirmed that tribal treaty rights are supreme federal law and that steelhead have always belonged to the Pacific salmon family.

Framing Dan Evans

September 26, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

One of my least favorite acts in political commentary is when someone tries to solve Washington State’s politics by invoking Dan Evans.

Pollster Stuart Elway’s numbers give that nostalgia something to point to: forty years of unbroken Democratic control over the governor’s office, and voters who feel less represented in state government with every passing cycle. The fix, we’re told, is a return to the “Evans moderate middle,” a lost bipartisan sweet spot the state misplaced sometime after Dixy Lee Ray.

The trouble is that Dan Evans was never a moderate. To lean on another hackneyed cliché about Evans: he trained as a civil engineer before running for office, and it showed. Moderates manage what already exists. Engineers build what doesn’t.

I want to acknowledge that taking on Stuart Elway is a steep climb. He has forgotten more about state government than most of us will ever know. But when commentators cleave too tightly to a common-sense understanding of the past, we are led deeply astray about our current situation.

Evans governed from 1965 to 1977, a Republican in the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, closer in temperament to Nelson Rockefeller than to anyone currently running under that party’s banner.

He didn’t administer the state so much as reconstruct it in ways that mayors like Katy Wilson or Zohran Mamdani, or other Democratic Socialists of America, could only dream of.

His greatest achievements resemble a Beatles catalog more than the modest but snappy Cars discography his reputation suggests today.

In 1970, before the federal EPA existed, his administration stood up the nation’s first state-level Department of Ecology. In 1967, he took a loose patchwork of junior colleges and welded it into a single, state-funded community college system, then built Evergreen State College out of nothing as an experiment in public liberal arts education. That same year, even before the Boldt Decision or co-management was a twinkle in the state’s eye, he created the State Indian Affairs Commission by executive order. In 1971, he did the same for the State Women’s Council. In 1975, over real regional hostility, he sent state officials to Camp Pendleton to welcome Southeast Asian refugees into Washington. In 1972, he pushed through the Washington Futures bond measures, a statewide investment in water systems, parkland, and pollution control that people now mostly take for granted, the way you take for granted a bridge you’ve never thought about falling down.

None of that reads like the record of a man who split differences.

Then come today’s actual battles. This fall’s election is shaping up to be an OK Corral over the idea of a state income tax. Even in what passed for Republicanism in the 1960s and 1970s, expanding the tax base was not a mainstream idea.

Twice, in 1969 and again in 1973, Evans spent real political capital trying to replace the state’s sales-tax-dependent revenue system with a state income tax. He lost both times. The attempt was a bid to rip out the foundation of how Washington funds itself and pour a new one, which is as far from splitting the difference as a governor can get.

I’m going to pause here to reflect on why I think Evans’ legacy is so misunderstood. Brent Walth’s “Fire at Eden’s Gate” is a definitive, third-party biography of Tom McCall, who in many ways was Oregon’s splashier counterpart to Dan Evans. Both governed as progressive Republicans during the 1960s and 1970s, and both harbored national political aspirations. McCall died in 1983, but both men were ultimately stymied because being a progressive in Republican politics left them without a clear lane. Crucially, “Fire at Eden’s Gate” (unlike McCall’s own autobiography, “Tom McCall: Maverick”) offers a clear-eyed explanation not only of who McCall was, but of how he developed and where he fit into Oregon’s trajectory. Rather than depending on short, 500-word spurts of political commentary, we have a 500-page literary history of the politician and the state to learn from.

Evans’ own autobiography, disappointingly released four years ago by the Legacy Washington Project, is a mishmash of personal reflections, low-density insights, and oral histories. To say it fails to meet the moment is a drastic understatement. I can imagine a Brent Walth version of Evans’ life written in the 1980s or 1990s, offering Washington State historians and commentators a far clearer view of our political history through his career. Instead, we are left with a gauzy view of a moderate who never existed.

So why does “moderate” stick to him anyway? Part of it is an optical illusion created by distance.

Washington’s two parties no longer share any real ideological overlap. So any Republican who governed before that gap opened reads, in hindsight, as a centrist by default. If we cared about all three-term Republican governors equally, Art Langlie might equally be cited as Evans as our uber-moderate.

Another part of it is a category error, the assumption that “worked with Democrats” must mean “wanted less” Republican things. The real story is that Democrats held the legislature through nearly all of Evans’s tenure, and working with them was the only way anything got done. He was simply doing what a governor does when he is looking for a win.

It’s also worth asking who actually killed the income tax, because it wasn’t a mythical moderate middle failing to show up. Evans purged the John Birch Society from the state GOP in 1965 and took fire from his own party’s right flank for years afterward.

His tax package died ironically at the hands of the Washington State Labor Council, working alongside conservative Democrats who didn’t trust that sales tax cuts would stay cut, that corporate loopholes would actually close, or that a Republican governor’s hand on an income tax lever wouldn’t eventually fall heavily on working people. That was an entrenched coalition choosing a flawed status quo over structural risk, which are two very different political afflictions.

This is where Elway’s historic framing, for all its useful polling, points in the wrong direction. His numbers are accurate: voter optimism has fallen steadily since 2000, the sense of being represented in the state legislature has eroded just as steadily, and Gary Locke, Chris Gregoire, Jay Inslee, and Bob Ferguson have each posted negative job-performance ratings despite Democrats holding an eighteen-point (and growing) identification advantage and solid legislative majorities.

But Elway’s frame treats the loss of two-party equilibrium as the cause, as if the discontent would ease the moment Republicans could compete again. It wouldn’t, because competition was never what people were actually missing.

What voters are reacting to is that they keep electing candidates who run on structural change, and they keep getting careful administrators running Evans’s institutions on autopilot.

Locke and Gregoire inherited the Department of Ecology, the community college system, Evergreen, the whole architecture Evans built, and they governed it defensively, protecting what already existed instead of building what didn’t. That approach stops holding up when housing costs triple in a generation, when transit can’t come close to keeping pace with growth, when the state still runs on the most regressive tax structure in the country. Running 1970s machinery with real competence starts to look, after enough years, less like governance and more like curating a museum.

The actual disease is what one-party rule lets a party get away with: governing cautiously out of fear of a Republican challenger who, across most of Washington, doesn’t meaningfully exist.

The cost of caution compounds. When a technocratic government stops asking why the road is falling apart and gets really good at patching the potholes, it opens a gap between what the government does and what people need it to do.

That gap doesn’t stay empty for long. It’s exactly the space anti-institutionalism moves into, whether that takes the shape of a tax-slashing ballot initiative, a fringe candidate, or plain contempt for the idea that institutions can still accomplish anything. You don’t argue your way out of that kind of contempt with tighter management. You build your way out of it, the way Evans did, by giving people new institutions worth believing in.

Evans was never the patron saint of restraint we keep invoking when they get tired of our government. He was the last governor in Washington State willing to treat the state itself as something you build. The moderate middle everyone’s nostalgic for never existed. What existed was a governor who thought building government was the job.

Empty Quarter

September 19, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

I grew up on Wilson Street between 18th and 22nd, right across from the old Olympia School District bus barn.

On an 1856 township map, the land in what would become this part of Olympia doesn’t even have a name. The surveyor noted that the ground was rolling, the soil was second rate, and the trees were fir and cedar. Nobody thought it was anything special.

When I grew up there, I got everywhere on foot, on a bike, bus or in the back of my parents’ car. We usually headed straight downtown on the bus or in our car toward St. Mike’s for mass and school.

But sometimes we went south down Boulevard toward Yelm Highway. In the 1980s, there wasn’t much out there. Boulevard south of 22nd was mostly open farmland with a few isolated houses and developments (not even neighborhoods). It was so rural that when we walked our dog down the road to the Boulevard Vet, he’d spot a horse in a field and panic, convinced he’d found a giant, terrifying dog.

That area had a specific kind of rural feel, similar to Rich Road today. You’d see subdivisions popping up alongside hobby farms and single houses on ten-acre lots. Suburban growth was slowly taking over the countryside. Washington passed strong growth management laws later to stop this kind of piecemeal building. If those rules had existed ten years earlier, southeast Olympia would look completely different today.

Instead, it turned into the most car-dependent part of the city. There’s almost no commercial life except for a few stores near 18th and Yelm Highway. It feels like a neighborhood without a real center.

You can still spot traces of the old rural landscape underneath the pavement if you know where to look.

Take Old Morse Road, for example. It’s a short, narrow stub running between 30th and a city path near Boulevard. That stub is the last remaining piece of a dog-leg dirt road that used to connect Boulevard with Morse Merryman across farmland.

Boulevard itself has an interesting history. Developers in the 1890s named it Grand Boulevard because they planned a massive new district. Then an economic crash hit the area right after statehood and crushed those plans. The “Grand” part was dropped, and the road slowly crept south over the decades until it finally reached Yelm Highway.

Morse Road got its name from Harry Morse, who farmed across from where Washington Middle School stands today. You can piece his life together from old newspaper snippets. In 1918, the county hired him to build a road fence, and later that year he sold a cow and put out an ad for six pigs. By 1922, he wanted to trade his 28 acres in what would be SE Olympia for a smaller plot, and his family eventually moved out to Long Lake. He spent the rest of his life working timber, raising livestock, and dealing with family tragedy. His son Roy was killed in a logging accident in 1930. Harry moved to Black Lake in 1931 and lived there until he died in 1955. It’s striking how someone can get a street named after them and leave behind mostly classified ads.

Those old newspaper ads also capture the neighborhood’s shift. Before World War II, people on Morse Road advertised farm gear, cows, and horses. After the war, the ads listed ten-acre lots and single-family suburban homes.

The area was also at the center of a long border dispute between neighboring cities.

For about two months when I was a kid, my house sat inside the City of Lacey before the state Supreme Court ruled it was part of Olympia. As suburbs expanded after the war, Olympia started annexing surrounding land. Neighboring communities got nervous and decided to incorporate as their own town. In 1963, the proposed border for Lacey ran all the way west to Boulevard Road, three miles further west than where the city line sits today.

In 1964, Olympia began annexing land eastward toward Lilly Road. Residents near Boulevard Road voted against joining Olympia, and Lacey’s first attempt to incorporate failed that summer. But when Lacey successfully incorporated two years later, its fire district already covered Boulevard Road, so it made sense for the area to join Lacey.

Olympia moved fast to reverse that. A month later, residents in western Lacey petitioned Olympia to annex them. Olympia accepted and used a forgotten 1890 law to hold a citywide vote on taking the land. Lacey sued, but Olympia won the vote and absorbed the neighborhood, extending its border all the way to College Street.

Lacey fought the annexation in court, arguing that the land wasn’t properly connected to Olympia. The courts rejected the lawsuit because the old 1890 law was still valid. That’s how my family’s block ended up in Olympia. In 1969, state lawmakers finally updated that ancient annexation law to prevent similar fights.

That legal update came right before Olympia and Lacey voted on whether to merge into a single city. The merger failed in both towns. In Olympia, it lost by fewer than thirty votes. In Lacey, voters overwhelmingly rejected it, except for two precincts near Panorama City. Most residents in the Boulevard area clearly preferred being part of Olympia.

Briarwood was the first major subdivision built here after annexation. What people call Briarwood today is actually four distinct phases of housing that expanded north from Morse Merryman over several decades. That slow expansion would be the force that cut up Morse Road, leaving it as a dead-end stub.

Developers skipped the traditional grid layout because urban planning had changed. Between the 1920s and 1950s, planners started favoring curved streets and dead-end cul-de-sacs. They wanted to protect kids from fast traffic. Federal housing guidelines in 1936 even penalized grid patterns. Curved roads were also cheaper to build because developers could follow the natural hills instead of leveling the terrain. People also loved the idea of quiet, tree-lined streets that felt like living in the country.

Residents moved out here for that quiet rural feel that was quickly eaten up by suburban traffic, and old rural Morse Road got in the way of new developments.

In September 1976, seven neighbors spoke out against a developer’s request to close 550 feet of Morse Road. They worried that closing the street would turn their road into a dead end. Other neighbors rejected a proposal for a new connecting street for the same reason. City officials put the project on hold until they could figure out a better traffic plan.

Resolving that disagreement took twenty years. The Olympia City Council finally approved closing that section of Morse Road on September 24, 1996. It was a quick vote on the consent calendar during a meeting where council members were also starting their first discussions about climate change.

The quiet decision to carve up Morse Road was explained months later during a flare up in a February 1997 city council meeting over a proposed street connection between the nearby Cove Subdivision and Holiday Hills. Residents voiced sharp concerns, pointing out that opening the road would dump excessive traffic onto narrow streets lacking sidewalks, exacerbate dangerous sight-distance hazards, and threaten nearby streams and wetlands. While city traffic analysis estimated the connection would add roughly 100 peak-hour vehicles, officials ultimately listened to the neighborhood’s pushback. The car-centric design of this part of town built fear and more cars because we needed them to live here. Rather than forcing a full vehicle thoroughfare and allow a minor relief for some other road, the council opted instead to build a pedestrian path, maintaining local quiet while preserving a walkable link between the developments that really didn’t have anywhere to walk to.

The old Morse Road was finally broken apart when Briarwood 3 was built in the late 1990s. Workers cut the original route at a curve, replacing the road with two home lots and a narrow walking path between them. The northern piece became 30th Avenue, while the middle section was renamed Old Morse Road. Another piece became 30th Way, and the southern stretch was renamed after Margaret McKenny Elementary School.

Naming a suburban roadway after Margaret McKenny feels like a strange irony. She was the city’s leading naturalist, a relentless advocate for getting outside on foot to study native plants, fungi, and mosses. Plastering her name onto a stretch of asphalt turns a lifetime dedicated to wild places into a marketing hook for housing subdivisions. The road itself stands for the exact kind of sprawl and habitat loss she fought against while protecting places like Watershed Park or the Nisqually Delta. In the 1950s, her biggest civic victory was stopping downtown progress in its tracks, rallying locals to block plans for a parking garage underneath Sylvester Park. Attaching her memory to a car-dependent neighborhood street quietly undermines her work, trapping her legacy in the very pavement she opposed.

Briarwood kept growing north and connected with other new subdivisions like Rossmoor, Castlewood, the Birches, and Briar Glen. Together, they formed a massive neighborhood of isolated cul-de-sacs. Instead of a connected grid, the streets spread out like a hand with broken fingers that don’t touch.

The winding streets succeeded at keeping local traffic low. But while traditional grids distribute cars across many parallel streets, this layout forces every car from every cul-de-sac onto a single main road. Cutting off neighborhood connections made walking everywhere impractical, forcing us to drive for every errand. All those car trips jammed onto Boulevard and Yelm Highway, causing traffic and wider roads that ultimately destroyed the quiet rural character people originally moved here for.

We can’t rebuild old Morse Road or undo decades of suburban growth. The real focus should be on improving the neighborhood we have today.

I want to write more about this idea with a terrible name, suburban retrofitting. This means bring back traditional elements into neighborhoods with wide, useless lawns, cul-de-sacs and dead streets.

Simple changes could make a big difference. Like adding Accessory Dwelling Units was a radical idea thirty years ago, we need to lean into the idea of adding Accessory Commercial Units. Adding a small corner market or café would give people a destination to walk to.

The one good thing about the ghost of Morse Road was that some of it was preserved in the form of a walking path between two isolated neighborhoods. Obviously a good thing when there is a school nearby. Once we give people a place to walk to in these neighborhoods, cul-de-sac to cul-de-sac walking paths should become the norm, not the exception.

Connecting cul-de-sacs with walking paths and bike trails would restore convenient shortcuts using existing public land. I would be remiss if I did not point out that we’ve already updated our zoning to allow duplexes or accessory dwelling units, adding more flexible housing options as our needs change.

Again, I don’t think it’s worth much to imagine Morse Road whole again, or to run the counterfactual where we protected the farms, or built densely, or traded some privacy for something in common. The question is what to do with what’s here.

What began as second-rate timberland on an 1856 map gradually transformed into a quiet farming corner, only to be sliced up by mid-century suburban developments and political boundary fights. As curved cul-de-sacs replaced the traditional street grid, old dirt routes like Morse Road were fragmented, leaving behind a car-dependent landscape isolated from local businesses. We won’t undo decades of suburban sprawl, retrofitting these neighborhoods with small commercial spaces, flexible housing, and interconnected walking paths offers a practical way to restore the walkability and community life.

After Labor Day

September 12, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

One hundred years ago, Labor Day was a big deal in Olympia. Thousands of folks gathered every year for huge community celebrations. But as the decades rolled on, these public spectacles vanished.

If we look at the history of Olympia’s picnics, the bitter political fights that nearly tore them apart, and how places like Tenino did things differently, we can see why Labor Day shifted. It turned from a bold display of worker power into a long weekend for relaxing. Looking back at this history shows us why year-round, local community organizing apparently still matters today.

During the 1930s, Labor Day in Olympia was a major event. These gatherings gave workers a chance to blow off steam while showing solidarity. At the 1936 picnic at Columbus Park on Black Lake, local timber unions put on a real show. Crowds gathered to watch intense logging contests like tree falling, log bucking, and highline work. It was fun, but it also put the community’s hard daily work on full display.

And even when political drama flared up, huge crowds still showed up. In September 1937, despite boycotts and union threats, more than 6,500 people gathered at Millersylvania State Park. Families enjoyed sports, free coffee, and over 2,000 ice cream cones. These picnics were deeply rooted in everyday life for local working families.

That massive turnout in 1937 happened right in the middle of a national feud within organized labor. Olympia’s timber industry felt the heat directly. The fight set the traditional American Federation of Labor (AFL) against the newer, industry-wide Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). In July 1937, local timber workers broke away from the AFL to join the CIO’s new International Woodworkers of America (IWA), setting up their regional headquarters in Olympia.

Because the Olympia Central Labor Council held an AFL charter, national leaders told them to kick out the new CIO group. But local leaders hesitated because everyone worked together in the same town. Things boiled over in September 1937 when the council invited Harold Pritchett, the outspoken president of the IWA, to speak at the Millersylvania picnic. Conservative AFL unions boycotted the event in protest, and national AFL bosses temporarily suspended the local council’s charter. Soon after, AFL drivers began refusing to haul timber stamped with CIO logos.

This bitter argument stopped abruptly in 1938 when a bigger threat appeared. Opponents introduced State Initiative 130, a ballot measure designed to strictly limit union power. Realizing they could both lose everything, rival AFL and CIO groups set aside their differences to fight the bill together. They defeated the measure in November 1938, turning that year’s Labor Day into a unified political push. This teamwork built lasting ties through the United Labor Lobby, eventually leading to a full merger in 1957 under the Washington State Labor Council.

Looking back even further to Labor Day 1918, the celebration was even larger. The day kicked off at 10 in the morning with a parade starting at the corner of Seventh and Adams, featuring union members marching with banners, music, and floats through the city streets to the Labor Hall on Capitol. By noon, the crowds gathered at Priest Point Park for a basket lunch with free hot coffee, followed by a patriotic address by George F. Cotterill, the former progressive Mayor of Seattle. The afternoon included a jitney dance at the chalet and a variety of lively athletic contests, from a spike-driving competition for women to a hat-trimming contest for men, with winners taking home prizes in Thrift Stamps. The celebration capped off late into the night with the annual ball at the Tumwater Clubhouse, showing just how deeply these events were woven into the social fabric of the town.

Even though the AFL and CIO united after World War II, big public Labor Day events began to fade. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers marched through city streets to demand eight-hour workdays and safer conditions. Today, those giant parades have mostly disappeared across North America. Instead, we get backyard barbecues, quiet trips to the lake, and retail sales.

This cultural shift happened for a few reasons (most clear in hindsight):

One, there are just fewer union members. In the mid-twentieth century, about 1 in 3 American workers belonged to a union. Over time, manufacturing jobs moved, economic patterns shifted, and private-sector union membership fell below 6%. Without dense concentrations of organized workers in urban centers, local councils lost the funds and volunteers needed to build floats, hire bands, and run citywide events.

Car-based suburban life changed things. In a way, early union victories changed how people spent their time. The 40-hour workweek, paid time off, and safety rules became standard. As post-war workers earned steady wages and moved to suburban neighborhoods, social life centered around homes and yards. The long weekend became a time to enjoy leisure, which seems to be what workers had fought for all along.

And during the Cold War era, unions faced political pressure to tone down working-class speeches. Speeches became formal and routine. As the activist energy cooled, public interest in listening to hours of speeches quickly dropped.

In Tenino, their Labor Day event stretched out longer, but it is an open question whether it was just a precursor to the leisure version of Labor Day. Their celebration was always more of a town festival than a union rally. Started in 1923 by the local Eagles, the Tenino Labor Day Celebration packed in parades, speeches, sports, a 36-piece military band, boxing matches, and street dances. By the 1940s and 1950s, it felt like an annual homecoming, complete with carnivals, clam bakes, motorcycle stunts, and logging shows.

Tenino’s weekend stood apart from Olympia’s events in a few key ways.

First, local clubs like the Eagles and later the Lions Club organized the event, rather than trade unions. Also, residents saw it as a social weekend to catch up with old friends and former neighbors. The schedule featured contests for a Labor Day Queen, thrill shows, and local baseball games. This is more Lakefair than Labor rally.

Even though loggers competed in skill contests, I couldn’t find any evidence of union organizing or political campaigning in Tenino. The event ran until 1967, when the Eagles stopped hosting it. In 1968, Mayor Kenneth Hedden started Oregon Trail Days in late July. Focused on local pioneer history with fiddling and traditional crafts, that new festival replaced the old celebration and continues today.

Looking back, there isn’t one simple reason why both the Olympia labor picnics and the Tenino parade stopped. Instead, they matched broader national trends. Television, spread-out suburban neighborhoods, declining union membership, and commercialized holidays all played a part.

Old newspapers only tell us so much. While we can map out big economic changes, we miss the personal stories and local debates that ended these events. The real reasons why the Tenino parade faded in the late 1960s live in the memories of the people who were there. To get the full picture, we have to talk to people and gather lived experiences that official records leave out.

The shift of Labor Day from a big public rally to a private weekend of rest shows how people gradually pulled back from public life. If we want to reconnect with our communities, we need local, year-round effort that brings people together in person.

I started my public and political life leading up to the 2004 presidential election and the Democratic primary. I first attended meetings for Howard Dean, and my official start in politics was the 2004 caucus, where I was an undeclared alternate candidate (because Dean had already imploded by then). I liked Dean not necessarily for his anti-Iraq War stance (seemed like a no-brainer) but for the organizational theory behind his candidacy. The joint in-real-life and online connection really mattered to me.

I enjoyed the idea of caucuses, of neighbors getting together in real life. I put a lot of time and energy into ideas around civic engagement, libraries and how public life could be reshaped and made purposeful in the internet age.

And there was a lot of energy and thinking in this. So when I moved from the Dean meetups to actual Democratic Party meetings, I started working around the edges to bring that organizing ideal into the party. At the time I started engaging in party politics, it seemed too focused on campaigns and not enough on organizing between elections.

The Blue Tiger Democrats was an idea that was born on the East Coast and in the Midwest. The big idea was to turn the Democratic Party back into an engine of civic engagement, and not just engage in electoral politics. I was excited, and my main effort was to broaden the membership of the local Democratic Party so you didn’t have to be a PCO to be involved. But with kids and work, my involvement faded. Blue Tigers organized ongoing community service projects like food drives and highway cleanups, building trust through regular local work. But as far as I can tell, the movement largely faded.

This interview on the Democratic Socialists of America rhymed heavily with what I thought Blue Tigers could have evolved into. Obviously, Blue Tigers were more big-tent Democrats and DSA is not, but the fact that the DSA works through active local chapters with volunteers plugged directly into ongoing housing, labor, and community issues seems important.

The best version of DSA functions as a durable, membership-driven movement party that operates far beyond the electoral calendar by integrating continuous, on-the-ground activism. Rather than acting strictly as a traditional party faction or a transient social movement, the organization attempts to build deep civic trust and support broader movements between election cycles.

Yes, this is a far cry from a day-long Labor Day event attended by thousands, but it is a small shoot of activity that isn’t necessarily just asking for votes or direct action.

Moving away from glossy, high-budget media and expanding hands-on local organizing to the social organizing that builds human connection can help refresh our communities. Whether it’s through labor unions, mutual aid projects, or neighborhood groups, working together locally helps us turn quiet routines back into meaningful community connections.

We know it’s history because the bill comes due

September 5, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

Washington State is getting invoices. A record $614 million in outstanding state liabilities for legal fees, jury awards, and tort settlements. A housing and homelessness crisis keeps compounding. These things are a single bill representing the real toll of history. Washington State ended its fiscal year on June 30 on the hook for this record-setting $614 million because its 1967 waiver of sovereign immunity is exceptionally broad. Public liability exposure continues to grow.

This crisis is driven largely by childhood sexual abuse claims in the foster system, which ballooned from just four claims in 2018 to 1,110 in 2025. Individual verdicts have reached up to $117 million. Local governments face immense strain too. The Washington Counties Risk Pool fell $25.3 million short of solvency requirements due to skyrocketing claim liabilities, directly threatening core public services. This phenomenon is a concrete example of why history matters. Because the facts of history come clear, people living today pay the price.

Nowhere is this story told more clearly than in the KUOW podcast “Adults in the Room.” In the late 1990s, systemic and cultural failures converged at Garfield High School in Seattle to shield a popular teacher from accountability and suppress the student-led push for truth. The teacher served as a revered leader of an outdoors program, which created a powerful halo effect. People framed his boundary-crossing behavior as evidence of a unique and progressive rapport with students rather than abuse. When early warning signs surfaced, district administrators chose self-preservation over investigation. They conducted cursory internal reviews and buried complaints when victims minimized events out of fear or loyalty. This culture of institutional protection was reinforced by a total lack of rigorous mandatory reporting protocols, allowing authorities to treat serious allegations as internal personnel matters instead of launching independent law enforcement inquiries.

When student journalists tried to breach this wall of silence, the adult establishment closed ranks. They weaponized peer pressure and official authority to isolate the whistle blowers, demand their resignations, and vilify them for smearing the school reputation. Institutional preservation took precedence over student safety until Hudson’s suicide brought the crisis to a tragic end. History lives in human stories like this one. We care about what happened inside those buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The tort bill piling up is the incoming tide of history and institutional failings that our future selves will thank us for learning.

City halls have their own version of the same premise. Across Washington, municipal governments and homeowners have fought for decades to reduce density and maintain low-density zoning, even while facing a severe housing affordability and homelessness crisis. Local political pressure restricts the growth of the overall housing supply by enforcing restrictive land-use policies like single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes, and height limits.

Legally banning denser multi-family housing created an artificial shortage that drives vacancy to critical lows and surges rents. Research shows that regional housing costs and low vacancy are primary structural predictors of homelessness, far more than poverty or addiction. Since the 1970s, our regional history is dotted with neighborhood defenders systematically blocking housing through public hearing abuse and environmental challenges. Now that we do not have enough housing, the bill is coming due.

The tendency to choose sensational distractions over systemic reality is deeply rooted in Washington civic culture. We can see this in two parallel events in Thurston County during the late 1980s, which were the Satanic hysteria surrounding Paul Ingram and the ignored reality of systemic abuse at the Olympia Kiwanis Boys Ranch.

In 1988, Thurston County Sheriff Deputy Paul Ingram was arrested on abuse allegations by his adult daughters. Driven by church doctrines, suggestive interrogation, and recovered-memory therapy, Ingram developed a coerced false confession to a fictitious Satanic cult involving ritual murder and animal sacrifice. We eagerly embraced the sensational panic despite scientific proof that his confessions were suggested. Ingram pleaded guilty and served fourteen years.

Simultaneously, real abuse occurred under state supervision at the Olympia Kiwanis Boys Ranch, a foster home founded in 1971. For over two decades, administrators outsourced safety and discipline to the residents themselves. They enforced order through violent practices like open season, which involved coordinated group beatings of boys who ran away or broke rules. Wards were beaten with heavy objects, and older residents systematically targeted younger boys for sexual assault. Rather than reporting these rapes, staff documented them in internal logs and dismissed them to the victims as normal adolescent behavior.

This abuse was protected by systemic regulatory failure and political cronyism. A 1989 state audit found the ranch failed eight of ten licensing requirements and engaged in systematic financial over-billing. Yet, the state restored its license and reduced its over-billing debt. In 1991, a state official directly intervened to bypass licensing staff and keep the ranch open. When Olympia Police confirmed pervasive abuse in 1992, the local prosecutor declined to file criminal charges.

The state cannot escape the financial invoices for decades of ignored institutional harm. When the criminal justice system failed to hold ranch administrators criminally liable, the civil tort system became the primary vehicle for establishing accountability and securing restitution. Decades of civil litigation culminated in over $70 to $77 million in settlements for survivors. Washington State and private insurers paid out an additional $40 to $50 million to settle historic abuse claims involving the Kiwanis Vocational Home in Centralia, establishing that the organization possessed institutional knowledge of the abuse.

These historic payouts contributed to a fiscal crisis. Because Washington’s waiver of sovereign immunity is broad and courts eliminated the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse, foster care abuse claims ballooned. This liability strained risk management systems. The Washington Counties Risk Pool failed its regulatory solvency test and fell $25.3 million short of unpaid claims estimates. The pool was forced to levy an immediate 35 percent base-rate increase on member counties. These skyrocketing payouts drain funding from core public services, creating a vicious cycle where underfunded programs lead to further claims of neglect.

Public finance research shows that newspaper closures lead to higher municipal borrowing costs. Lenders demand higher interest rates as compensation for unmonitored governments that are more prone to wasteful spending and corruption. Borrowing costs increase after a newspaper closure. Nationally, this news desert premium costs local governments and taxpayers $1.1 billion annually. When local media erodes, egregious misconduct goes unmonitored. We might miss the picture in our local politics, but the banks lending money to our cities and counties will not.

I want to draw a counterbalance to my argument by acknowledging a way that history is often discussed in our time: Historic preservation of houses or structures.

This is well-meaning work and something that I seem to nod to in my work when I write about parking lots.

But history is recorded in the structural debts we inherit from the past rather than the amber of a static building. When we obsess over freezing physical structures in time, we engage in a form of cultural narcissism that distracts from living crises. Nostalgia offers a sanitized version of the past that shields us from accountability. Real history demands that we confront how yesterday institutional self-preservation and exclusionary planning shape the housing affordability and systemic failures we pay for today. True historical understanding means letting go of physical fetishes to focus on human needs, ensuring our communities adapt, account for past harms, and build an inclusive future.

Restore Olympia’s East Capitol Campus Neighborhood

August 29, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

The Washington State Department of Transportation headquarters on Olympia’s East Capitol Campus feels like a relic of a rapidly vanishing era of government buildings. It was built in 1970 to house hundreds of state employees. Its daily occupancy has dropped to a small fraction of its pre-pandemic numbers. On any given day, fewer than fifty workers type away in its vast corridors.

And remote work isn’t the only reason the building feels like a ghost town. In late 2025, employees started reporting visible cracking in the structural concrete. Fearing a potential collapse during a major earthquake, state administrators restricted access and moved most of the remaining staff out. Today, the Transportation Building sits mostly empty, sidelined by serious structural safety concerns.

That evacuation forces a much bigger question about how we use space in the city. The entire East Capitol Campus stands as a mistake in scale. It’s a sterile expanse of empty lawns and cavernous parking garages, built half a century ago by wiping out a thriving, walkable neighborhood. We have a rare chance to undo a poor design decision from the 1950s and stitch the surrounding community back together.

The Erasure of the East Campus

To understand how Olympia ended up with this empty concrete and grass wilderness, you have to look back to the years right after World War II. As state government expanded, the Washington State Supreme Court decided that executive offices for state agencies had to stay right here at the seat of government in Olympia.

Planners faced a choice on where to put everyone. Instead of folding that growth into the existing neighborhood street grid, they took a different path. Guided by a 1957 traffic study, they proposed a massive expansion to the east, designed primarily to clear vehicle congestion around the historic West Campus.

What followed was the systematic clearance of an eighteen-block residential neighborhood. Bounded by Capitol Way to the west, Jefferson Street to the east, 11th Avenue to the north, and Maple Park to the south, this area was once one of Olympia’s densest and most walkable communities.

The neighborhood featured William Winlock Miller High School, convenience stores, duplexes, and at least six different apartment buildings.

The state took over seventy-five private properties through a campaign that dragged on for decades. The story of Roy H. Bergh, who was 77 at the time, and his wife Leila, 72, always stands out to me. For thirteen years, the Berghs resisted every attempt by the state to condemn their property. The struggle ended in 1973 when authorities evicted and jailed the couple for refusing to leave the home they felt was stolen from them. Today, the northern flank of the Natural Resources Building sits on the exact spot at Franklin Street and 12th Avenue where the Berghs used to live.

By the mid-1960s, the city closed off the historic cross streets, wiping the original grid off the map to make room for the new development. In place of a lived-in neighborhood, the state built a sprawling executive district designed entirely around cars.

What remains today feels hollow. The east side of Capitol Way lacks basic sidewalks, bordered instead by massive, empty lawns that almost nobody uses. Workers and residents lost a real community, replaced by acres of commuter parking garages and bulky 1970s office blocks.

What We Can Do

Other cities have run into this exact same problem, watching a single-use institutional dead zone drain the life out of their downtowns, and chosen to undo the damage. Here are four examples, running roughly from cautionary tales to truly instructive models.

In Minneapolis, a former expanse of surface parking lots and light industrial buildings turned into a mixed-use neighborhood remarkably fast. A new stadium, the Green Line light rail, and a central park called The Commons drove the transformation, drawing in retirees, empty-nesters, and younger professionals.

Downtown East offers a clear warning alongside its rapid growth. For years, the area lacked public schools and full-service grocery stores, making it tough to build a real community for families. Wide, car-dominated thoroughfares still hamper the kind of small-scale street life that makes a neighborhood feel like home.

Bellevue’s Spring District represents a fifteen-year effort to turn thirty-six acres of suburban light industrial warehouses into a dense, transit-oriented village. Anchored by a Sound Transit light rail station, planners designed the area to pair housing for thousands of residents with retail and tech offices.

In practice, the development feels like an isolated island. Wide, car-choked arterials turn leaving the district on foot into a hostile trek. City leaders also allowed the developer to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than building low-income units directly on site. The end result feels like an expensive, isolated bubble, cut off from the rest of the city.

In San Francisco, the old UCSF Laurel Heights campus is being converted from a massive, single-tenant institutional complex into a multi-building neighborhood. By adding 744 new homes, the development injects high-density housing right into an established, transit-rich neighborhood.

Breaking up that massive, single-user office site made room for public plazas, local shops, and a real mix of housing options. Despite some pushback from neighbors concerned about traffic, the project shows how a sprawling institutional footprint can fit right back into an existing city grid.

Then there’s Sacramento, where state and city leaders are actively turning obsolete state offices into housing. Backed by a $50 million grant from Meta, California is clearing out and knocking down three vacant, high-rise government buildings along Capitol Mall. In their place, Sacramento State University is building a downtown campus complete with student housing, a hotel, and spaces for performing arts.

The project relies on an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, using projected increases in property tax to fund the necessary site upgrades. Sacramento shows what happens when state government steps aside and turns over seismic, outdated real estate instead of just patching it. Housing follows. So does a university campus, along with actual reasons to stick around downtown after 5 p.m.

There are a lot of complicated factors that would play into a transformation of the East Campus. Without schools, groceries, and genuine reasons to spend time outside, you end up with another Downtown East. High density alone falls short, too, especially when surrounding wide roads cut people off or when developers pay into housing funds instead of building actual affordable units, creating the kind of isolated island seen in the Spring District.

The projects at Laurel Heights and Capitol Mall prove that breaking up a massive, single-owner institutional block is entirely doable. Sacramento shows who has to make the first move: the state, by stepping back and giving up ground it no longer needs.

The Adaptive Reuse of the WSDOT Building

Applying these lessons to Olympia starts right at the abandoned DOT headquarters. The physical structure and actual layout might be the best argument for saving it. We can probably turn the DOT building into housing.

Most modern office buildings feature deep, vast floor plates, which usually make converting them to residential space a total nonstarter. The center of the building stays pitch black no matter how many windows you cut into the exterior walls.

The DOT building was built in a distinct, elongated H-shape, creating thin, narrow office wings. The distance from the outer windows to the central hallway is surprisingly shallow, letting natural sunlight reach almost every square foot of the interior.

The H-shape also creates two large courtyards flanking the central passage, maximizing exterior wall space. That design allows developers to add windows along almost the entire perimeter, easily satisfying residential fire codes for natural light and emergency exits.

I’ll admit that I’m not a structural engineer, so my opinion on technical details should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the underlying geometry is hard to ignore.

The timing works out remarkably well to take this path now. The building already needs a massive seismic retrofit just to stay standing, meaning crews will strip the interior down to its raw concrete frame no matter what.

If the state brings in a private developer, workers can install the plumbing stacks, utility meters, and interior apartment walls right alongside the structural column upgrades. Since the building has to be gutted for safety reasons anyway, we’re looking at the most cost-effective window in its history to convert the space into housing.

The State Has to Let Go First

All of this discussion about East Campus is built on an underlying need for housing diversity and an opportunity to re-establish a walkable neighborhood in Olympia.

But the most glaring need would be addressing the ongoing, bitter dispute in the South Capitol neighborhood, highlighting a critical, unresolved pressure valve on the Olympia Campus.

South Capitol neighbors are currently fighting a pitched battle against lobbying firms and legislative-centric businesses that buy up historic residential homes, converting them into offices that sit empty for most of the year.

This commercial pressure is an artificial crisis. Historically, campus planners wanted to raze 20 acres of South Capitol for government expansion; instead, they went east. Today, we have the opportunity to create naturally occurring commercial spaces east of campus rather than forcing lobbyists to covertly commercialize historic residential streets. It makes market sense for lobbyists to want to be near the legislative building and offices. But there are very few commercial buildings within walking distance.

The state should allow private, mixed-use development on the underutilized East Campus. By diversifying the East Campus and integrating private offices, street-level retail, and high-density housing, Olympia can naturally draw the lobbying corridor out of historic neighborhoods and onto the campus itself.

We should first stop protecting the failed status quo.

We shouldn’t pretend the East Campus’s original vision is still working. The empty lawns, asphalt lots, and empty office buildings don’t add up to a living city. The era of the single-use commuter campus has run its course.

A reimagined East Campus won’t look like an Olympia neighborhood overnight. It’ll probably feel more like Portland’s South Waterfront: dense, modern, and waiting for the trees to grow in while community takes root. Still, the state of Washington and the City of Olympia have to start somewhere. It’s hard to think of a better place to begin than with the building that’s currently falling apart from the inside out.

From a Grand Central Public to a Parking Lot

August 22, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

It was the sign that got me first. I found a photo of an old-style, street-spanning sign that used to be on Columbia near Legion on the Ralphs Thriftway website. I was already

It stuck with me for days. There is a kind of whimsy that survives in old street signs, even now, even after everything around them got built specifically to remove that kind of whimsy. This one hung above Fifth Avenue, behind where a J.C. Penney store used to sit, in front of the original Ralph’s grocery store. And most importantly for this essay, right in front of a parking lot at Legion and Columbia downtown.

It was cut down in February 1958. It had stood there for thirty years and advertised the old Olympia Public Market and Ralph’s grocery store after that. The reason it came down was not really about the sign at all. J.C. Penney was enlarging its building, and during construction, the company had been running its store out of temporary quarters, the old Ralph’s Food Center building sitting immediately behind the main store. The sign had to go to make room. It also violated a city sign ordinance that had been around for some years. Some people in town mourned it, apparently, the way you mourn something that has been part of the wallpaper of your life for thirty years.

This is an essay in a series I am doing on the history of parking lots in downtown Olympia. Much of the downtown landscape is dominated by large parking lots. It is important to note their history and how they came about.

This destruction of street-spanning signs happened everywhere. Arch signs like this one were common in downtowns across North America by the early twentieth century, built to welcome visitors into town, to light up the main business corridor at night, or to promote whatever local industry the town wanted you to know about. And then, starting in the late 1890s and picking up speed through the twenties and thirties, city planning commissions started calling these things clutter. The City Beautiful movement pushed for standardized streetscapes, and steel arches strung with electrical wire got lumped in with everything else that made a commercial district look disorganized.

So by the 1940s and 1950s a bunch of things were converging at once. Mid-century design wanted clean lines, and an elaborate metal arch read as a gaudy leftover from the Victorian or Edwardian era instead of a symbol of anything modern. The arches themselves were also aging structural liabilities, built over public streets without much of a maintenance plan, and rust and wind shear, and heavy snow loads added up to a real risk of one falling on somebody. Car traffic was changing the calculus too. Freight trucks and emergency vehicles needed clear vertical sightlines and higher overhead clearance, and an arch spanning the road did not fit that anymore. Cities were writing stricter sign ordinances and right-of-way rules as well, the kind that made it flatly illegal for a private structure to hang over a public street. And advertising itself was moving on, toward neon blade signs mounted on the sides of buildings and flush storefront signage, which meant the arches had lost their actual job as the thing that lit up the street and told you where to shop. A few cities kept theirs. Reno famously rebuilt its gateway arch instead of tearing it down.

In April 1934, somebody proposed a centralized Farmers’ Market for West Legion Way, a single large private building where ranchers could sell straight to local consumers instead of going through a middleman. Then in December 1935 the property at the corner of Legion and Columbia sold, in one of the biggest downtown real estate deals of the year (the paper did not say what made it so big, just that it was). The sale marked a return to local ownership for the site. Ralph Stormans was already working that block by then. He had started his grocery career around 1934, managing a chain-owned Totem store at that corner.

On July 28, 1944, Stormans went into business for himself. He opened Ralph’s Food Center at 114 Legion Way, inside the old Totem Market building. The store had fresh groceries, a fruit and vegetable stand, and a meat department. A month later, on August 25, 1944, a restaurant called Ralph’s Center Lunch opened inside the building too. It became the kind of place people went for a hot lunch and a slice of pie and a cup of coffee.

In January 1946, exceptionally high tides lined up with heavy rain and overwhelmed the city’s storm sewers, and the food center flooded. It damaged a lot of stock, and Stormans led a protest to the city over the downtown drainage system.

By the late 1940s, Ralph’s had become enough of a landmark that a new paint store opening nearby did not bother listing its own address in its ads. It just said it was “next to Ralph’s food center.” On June 25, 1948, the store held a grand reopening after a major remodel, with a bigger produce department, self-service delicatessen counters, new checkout stands, and a full paint and wallpaper job done by the neighboring Hartley Paint Co.

In March 1950, Ralph’s closed for a stretch to install “speed-stands,” streamlined checkout counters meant to move shoppers through faster, along with new dairy and frozen meat counters.

Then in November 1952 the store expanded again, when he bought an old oyster company’s building on Puget Sound that same year and turned that into a second store instead. The original Legion Way store continued operating simultaneously. Stormans ran more than one location at once rather than closing the first.

That finally changed on November 29, 1956, when Stormans closed the original corner store for good and replaced it with a new supermarket up the hill near the Upper Eastside, the modern-day Ralph’s Thriftway at 1908 Fourth Avenue East. The papers called it a “mammoth food emporium.” It had automatic doors, a play area for kids, and leased space for two other businesses, John Gosk’s Blue Ribbon Meats and Al Bailey’s Bailey Drugs.

Once Stormans cleared out of 114 West Legion Way, the building got leased to J.C. Penney, and that is where the story loops back around to the sign. J.C. Penney used the old Ralph’s building as temporary quarters through all of 1957, while its main store, around the corner at Capitol Way and Legion Way, got completely torn down and rebuilt. The new building was designed by the local firm Wohleb and Wohleb and Associates, and construction started in January 1957. Somewhere in that stretch, the thirty-year-old sign above Fifth Avenue came down to clear room for the expansion. The new J.C. Penney opened on Thursday, January 2, 1958, with 32,800 square feet, three times the display space of the old store, plus year-round climate control and what the coverage called shadowless lighting. The date I have for the sign itself coming down is February 1958, which is odd, since that would put it a full month after the new store already opened. I am not sure if that is an error somewhere in my sources or if the “enlargement” work genuinely dragged on past opening day.

Once J.C. Penney moved into its new building, the old Ralph’s building at 114 West Legion Way got vacated for good. Back in late December 1956, when the building first emptied out, the owners had not lined up any bids yet on who would take it next.

Before I go any further, I want to back up and talk about the forces at play here. First, let us figure out what a “Public Market” (the use of the Ralph’s building at Columbia and Legion) actually was, because the term keeps showing up in my notes and I do not think it means what I first assumed. In the 1900s and 1910s, grocery shopping in a town like Olympia meant either an independent counter-service shop, where a clerk behind the counter picked every item on your list for you, or a seasonal open-air farmers market. High overhead, limited selection, that kind of thing. A “Public Market” or “Grand Central Public Market,” the kind of building that shows up in Olympia by the 1920s and 1930s, was a step past that but still a step short of a real grocery store. It was not a single business. It was closer to a mall of independent vendors, a baker here, a butcher there, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, sometimes a dry goods seller, each one leasing a stall from a master tenant or landlord. Very, very similar to the current-day Farmers’ Market, but less niche and more mainstream. So many of the niche things we appreciate now are actually the way we used to do things. The halls ran enclosed and year-round, and while local farmers still showed up seasonally, a lot of the stalls were worked by permanent merchant middlemen sourcing from regional distributors.

Ralph Stormans’ first store is the exact hinge point where that model gave way to the next one. A single operator consolidating a whole building’s worth of formerly independent stalls into one self-service supermarket, under one owner, with one register, is exactly the shift that turned public markets into what we would now just call a grocery store.

A few things drove that shift. In 1937 the folding shopping cart was introduced, which meant a shopper could push a cart through wide aisles and grab packaged goods themselves instead of working through five separate counter clerks in a market hall. Refrigeration and better supply logistics made it possible for one owner to stock fresh meat, dairy, and produce at the same time without leaning on specialized sub-tenants.

And as car ownership and downtown parking expanded, shoppers started preferring one consolidated stop with unified pricing and volume discounts over working their way through a hall full of separate vendors.

This note on car ownership is where we get back to the Stormans’ second location. In 1952, Stormans bought a building on Puget Sound, next to the Olympia Yacht Club, from the Brenner Oyster Company, and remodeled it into what the coverage described as a state of the art supermarket. This store ran on a genuinely clever logistics setup for its time. Groceries came off delivery trucks straight onto a conveyor belt that carried them up to storage on the second floor, and a second conveyor sent products back down to the shelves whenever they were needed. That setup let the store hold more inventory at once, which meant Stormans could buy in volume and keep prices down.

But most important? The location had space for a parking lot, while Legion and Columbia’s Food Center did not. This is also true for the Fourth Avenue store, up the hill. The Storman’s tore down a handful of single-family homes on two blocks, paved a parking lot and built a modern grocery store.

Back at Legion and Columbia, once J.C. Penney cleared out of the old Ralph’s building for good in the late 50s, the corner sat there without a tenant. Aerial photos show that by the 1960s the whole site had been flattened into a parking lot.

The strangest part of the whole story is what happened to J.C. Penney itself. Eventually, the store left downtown entirely and moved out to the Capital Mall, and the building it left behind, the one built specifically to be three times the size of the old store, with its climate control and its shadowless lighting, became a state office. Now, it is probably the plainest corner left in the entire downtown. And according to the historic nomination form for that old J.C. Penney building, it was that exact plainness, sitting there through the 1990s, that pushed the city to write the downtown design standards it still uses today.

Plain design in a refurbished J.C. Penney turned office building is offensive and we need to do something to make sure it doesn’t happen. But parking lots, aesthetically speaking, are the most plain and least human spaces we build. In honor of the cars and retail efficiency, we move beyond human-centered commercial designs, to build large, single-operator stores next to acre-sized parking lots. The current Stormas’ operations, even though they follow this model, are not the worst current-day offenders compared to Costco, Target and Walmart.

Thirty years after Ralph’s Food Center took over the old Grand Central Public Market, the first Farmer’s Market opened. Two years after that, the Food Coop opened their doors in a small location just a few blocks down from where the Public Market once was. Neither of these operations will ever be the center of Olympia’s food system, but they offer a return to the human-scale, community-focused operation of the public markets.

Captured Current

August 15, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

When you walk into Tumwater Falls Park, the Olympia Tumwater Foundation office is on your left and the WDFW hatchery facility on your right, directly ahead of you is the uppermost falls in the park. Google Maps marks it as a waterfall. Of course it does. Any water falling over a ledge looks like a waterfall, and this one photographs like one too.

It isn’t one. What you’re looking at is a dam.

The dam creates the waterfall, so in a narrow sense you’re not wrong to see falling water and call it that. But the structure underneath the water is not a natural feature. It was built, on purpose, by a company that needed it, and it’s worth remembering that before you remember anything else about this park.

The dam went up starting in July 1900, when the Olympia Light & Power Company began work on the upper falls under engineer A.J. Gillis. The goal, in the language of the time, was to “harness the falls” for a bigger hydroelectric operation, replacing an older industrial setup on the middle falls that had produced something like 400 horsepower. The new dam and its flume cost around $13,000, real money in 1900, and by October the company had built stone walls and a flume ten feet square, a wooden pipe carrying three tons of water per foot across 700 feet to the powerhouse. That first structure raised the water level four to six feet above the natural bedrock, enough to back up a slack water pool for roughly a mile upstream. In 1903 the west wing got reinforced in concrete and masonry, built specifically to survive the river’s flood stages.

When the dam reached its full and current height, it inundated flat land that is now part of the Brewery Complex, but was then called the “Chambers Place.”

Then in 1905 things got contentious. The Olympia Brewing Company and the power company both had founding claims to the Deschutes, and a legal fight broke out over who actually controlled its flow. The brewery needed water too, and the power company was starting to realize that its dry-summer turbine problem wasn’t going away on its own.

That fight is old news, but you can still feel its outcome every time you step into the river in July.

Here’s how far the dam’s reach actually extends today. The pool it creates sits at roughly 85 feet above sea level, and the dam itself only accounts for four to six feet of that artificial rise over the natural bedrock lip.

My back-of-the-napkin math says the reason its effect travels so far upstream has nothing to do with the dam’s height and everything to do with the valley above it. Between the dam and Pioneer Park, the river drops only three to four feet per mile, remarkably flat for a stream that’s about to plunge 82 feet through a gorge. A gentle gradient means a small impoundment backs up a long way, and the standard backwater math for this stretch puts the slack water influence at roughly 0.8 to 1.2 miles upstream of the dam.

Walk that distance and you pass through three distinct stretches. From the dam to about 0.3 miles up, past the old brewery complex and under the E Street and I-5 bridges, the current in summer is close to nonexistent, more pond than river, narrow and deep and still. From 0.3 to 0.8 miles, along the lower edge of the golf course, it’s still noticeably slower than a free-flowing river, the kind of water where you drift instead of ride. Past that, from 0.8 to 1.2 miles, the backwater curve finally tapers off, the water gets shallow again, gravel bars reappear, and you start to feel actual current, riffles instead of glass.

This matters most in summer, which is exactly when people are in the water. The Deschutes’ natural flow drops during peak tubing season, low enough that the dam’s slack water effect dominates the entire lower mile of the run. Instead of a current carrying you toward the takeout, you get what amounts to a long bathtub, and tubers spend the last 4,000 feet or so paddling and pushing themselves along by hand. The dam that most people don’t know is there is the reason the last leg of their float feels like work.

The 1905 fight over water didn’t stay a courtroom skirmish. The power company’s problem was simple: the river ran low every summer, right when demand for electricity was climbing, and its solution was to treat Lake Lawrence, up in the watershed, as a kind of savings account. The plan called for a canal a mile and a quarter long, dug to divert winter floodwater into the lake, dammed at its outlet to hold that water back, then metered out over the summer to keep the Tumwater powerhouse running. It required flooding land the company didn’t own and diverting water the brewery believed it had rights to, so the fight dragged through the courts for years, what one account called a monkey wrench in the gears of the whole project. To get the land, the power company pursued eminent domain, arguing in court that because it supplied both electricity and streetcar service to the growing city of Olympia, it had the legal standing to condemn private and public land in the public interest. The argument worked. Lake Lawrence fell under company control, a 25-foot concrete dam rose at its outlet, and the diversion canal got finished. The following summer, with its water supply secured, the company rebuilt the Tumwater Falls dam itself, adding four feet of height and flooding another 30 acres of condemned land along the way. By 1914 the company had what it wanted: a stable, year-round power supply for a city growing at twice its historical rate.

It didn’t get to enjoy that win for long. In 1919, Puget Sound Power & Light bought Olympia Light & Power outright, and as regional transmission grids spread across the Pacific Northwest, a small local operation like the one at Tumwater Falls stopped making much sense. Generation was phased out gradually over the following years. The physical evidence held on longer than the business did. It wasn’t until 1962 that crews finally dismantled the stone powerhouse and the penstock below the falls, clearing the lower river corridor for what came next: the Olympia Tumwater Foundation’s Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls, opened in 1962 on the site of the old plant.

The power company’s old foe for control of the river, the Olympia Brewing Company, ended up owning the old dam site a few decades after the Puget Power sale.

Notice what got removed in that demolition and what didn’t. The powerhouse and the penstock, the parts of the complex that unmistakably read as industrial machinery, came down. The dam, the part that produces a waterfall people like to photograph, stayed exactly where it was. Whether or not that was the intent, the 1962 clearing erased the site’s industrial past and preserved its scenic present in one move.

And here’s a theory worth taking seriously: that clearing is probably what started the Deschutes’ recreational floating culture in the first place. The newspaper record doesn’t show organized river floating before the park existed. It shows up within less than a decade of Brewery Park opening, when a group called the Rough Riders started promoting floats down the Deschutes in the early 1970s. That timing reads like cause and effect more than coincidence. People don’t float for fun through a demolished industrial corridor with no public access and no destination. They float through a park with parking, a takeout, and a name.

The Rough Riders called floating “quite relaxing,” while warning newcomers about log jams and waterfalls, a warning that carried real weight given the still-recent memory of five people drowning after being swept over an unmarked falls sometime in the 1960s. They noted that a float from the East Olympia railroad bridge down to the brewery could take about eight hours during high spring flows. In June 1972, police searched for a group of missing juveniles and found them safe, floating on a raft near the brewery. By 1978 the activity had become fully organized, with the Deschutes River Float & Picnic drawing crowds for a run from the Henderson Boulevard bridge down to Tumwater Falls Park. The early 1980s brought a surge in inner tubing specifically, and with it came friction. A 1983 article described complaints from riverfront residents about trespassing and safety, and tubers who ran into trouble often ended up “bedraggled” on someone’s back lawn, looking for help. Thurston County considered putting up warning signs at the popular entry points.

In 1988, the city of Tumwater bought a stretch of pasture along Henderson Boulevard and built Pioneer Park. On paper it’s a sports and nature park, all ballfields and trails. In practice it became the unofficial starting line for the float, several miles downstream of the old East Olympia entry point, with enough parking to make the whole thing genuinely accessible for the first time. What it didn’t do was settle the question the dam raises a mile downstream. Pioneer Park sits at the edge of the slack water zone, near it or inside it depending on the flow that year and depending on exactly where within the park you put in. The 1988 purchase moved the uncertainty upstream rather than resolving it, handing the question to individual people choosing a launch spot, most of whom have no idea the choice even matters.

The dam itself is now well past a century old, built in phases between 1900 and 1913, a concrete gravity structure that at this age almost certainly carries no steel reinforcement inside it. Washington State classifies it as a Category 3, low hazard dam, meaning that if it failed, nobody’s life would be at risk and the resulting damage would be minor. That classification is its own quiet form of forgetting, a bureaucratic note that says this structure doesn’t need anyone’s attention. Structurally, though, it’s in better shape than its age suggests. Because it’s keyed directly into bedrock, it’s largely immune to the foundation scour that kills most aging dams during overtopping. Predating rebar reinforcement by decades, it’s also immune to the internal rusting and spalling that eventually destroys modern concrete. And our mild, wet climate spares it the freeze-thaw cycling that cracks concrete apart in harsher places.

It isn’t invulnerable. Vegetation works its way into old construction joints and slowly wedges them wider. Water percolating through the structure leaches calcium hydroxide out of the cement over time, weakening it. A century of silt has built up behind the dam, adding a steady load against the upstream face. None of that adds up to sudden failure. Left alone, this dam is likely good for another 100 to 200 years, wearing away slowly at its joints and spillways rather than going all at once.

I emailed the Olympia Tumwater Foundation to ask about the dam’s structural condition. That’s the organization that turned the demolished powerhouse site into a park in the first place, the one that, whether they meant to or not, decided sixty years ago which parts of this history would stay visible and which would get hauled away. They’re looking into what they might have and get back to me later. I’ll update this post if they have anything.

So the next time you’re standing in Falls Park facing that uppermost falls, know what you’re actually looking at.

It’s a dam built in 1900 to solve a hydroelectric company’s dry summer problem, expanded in 1913 after a legal war over a lake most people have never heard of, stripped of its machinery in 1962, and left standing, quietly, as the scenic backdrop for a park built on top of its own demolition.

The float culture that treats this river as a summer playground likely exists because that park got built, not despite the dam’s industrial history but because a foundation cleared away the parts of that history that looked too much like a factory. And the ambiguity never really left. Somebody launching a tube from Pioneer Park on an ordinary August afternoon has no way of knowing, without doing the math we just did, whether they’re floating on a free river or drifting through a captured pool behind a hundred-and-twenty-year-old dam. Most of them will never think to ask. The current under them, either way, carries the settled residue of a legal fight, a corporate merger, a demolition crew, and a social structure built on a slack pool and two parks.

Rhyming History and the Center Not Holding

August 8, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Somebody in the Daily Olympian newsroom set the type for a headline on election night in 1896 that would have sounded impossible two years earlier.

Fusionists Get It All.

Every county office in Thurston County, captured by a coalition of Populists, Democrats, and Silver Republicans, three factions that had spent most of the decade distrusting each other more than they distrusted the Republicans. Two years before, the same county had gone the opposite direction entirely, a clean sweep from top to bottom, Sam Hyde to Sam Wiman, Republican the whole way down. Something had come loose in the space of one election cycle.

It’s coming loose again.

In Montana, an independent named Seth Bodnar is polling six points ahead of the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, in a race the sitting Republican senator chose not to run in at all. Steve Daines withdrew from his own primary at the last possible minute and handed the nomination to a hand-picked successor, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme. He did it rather than face the same current that pushed Bodnar out of a university presidency and into the race.

In Idaho, the Democratic nominee for Senate dropped out of his own contest a few days ago, not because he lost, but because his own party’s county chairs decided he couldn’t win and independent Todd Achilles could.

In Nebraska, the same thing happened a few weeks earlier. Democrat Cindy Burbank withdrew and cleared a direct path for independent Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and former union leader, to face Republican Pete Ricketts one-on-one. Osborn ran this same race in 2024 against a different Republican and lost by seven points, close enough in a state that red to get national Democratic strategists talking. They’re not being quiet about it either. Inside the party it already has a name, clearing the field, and there’s open pressure on Democratic nominees in Montana and South Dakota to do the same thing before November.

None of these three have heard of John R. Rogers. But, they’re running his play anyway.

Rogers is the reason 1896 looked the way it did, and getting to him means going back further, to the thing that put Thurston County farmers in a mood to blow up their own party in the first place. It wasn’t abstract. A farmer in 1894 who’d borrowed against next year’s wheat crop was paying that loan back in dollars that bought more than the dollars he’d borrowed. That’s what a gold standard does under deflation. Prices fall, so the debt doesn’t shrink, it grows, measured in the only thing that matters to a bank, which is what the dollar will buy. The Panic of 1893 had already wrecked the banks and dried up credit. Free Silver, the demand to coin silver without limit, was never really about metallurgy. It was a demand for enough new money in circulation that a farmer’s debt would shrink the way debts are supposed to, instead of getting heavier every harvest.

It is worth taking a small sidestep here to point out that the Populists (including Rogers) of this age were antisemitic and racists. This including the most famous Cascadian populist all the way down to the former Mayor of Tumwater, praising the former Confederacy.

In 1896, the trouble was that neither the Populists nor the Democrats could carry that demand alone in Washington State. The Democratic Party in the Pacific Northwest was still wearing the “party of rebellion” label left over from the Civil War, toxic to exactly the kind of voter it needed. The Populists had the energy but not the votes. So the two did something that looked, on paper, like a shotgun marriage. They fused their tickets, ran shared slates, and let the vessel do what neither party could do wearing its own name. It worked better than anyone expected. Rogers won the governorship with a 15,000 vote majority. James Hamilton Lewis and W.C. Jones took both congressional seats. The legislature flipped to a Fusionist majority so large it barely resembled the body that had convened two years earlier.

That’s the same math running in Montana, Idaho, and Nebraska right now, just without the word “fusion” attached to it. Bodnar only beats Alme in a poll if the Democrat, Alani Bankhead, isn’t also on the ballot splitting the anti-Alme vote. Run all four candidates and Alme wins with 41 percent. Take Bankhead out and Bodnar wins 50 to 44.

That’s the same toxic-brand arithmetic that pushed Populists and Democrats onto one ticket in 1896. In Idaho, that math wasn’t left to voters at all. Ada County Democrats gave their own nominee an ultimatum, raise real money or step aside, and when he couldn’t, he stepped aside, leaving Todd Achilles a clean shot at a three-term incumbent in a state that hasn’t elected a non-Republican senator since 1974. Nobody called it fusion. It’s the identical mechanism wearing a 2026 haircut, a party choosing to disappear from a ballot line because its own name was the obstacle.

Rogers’s win is where most tellings of 1896 stop, as if the story ends at the ballot box. It doesn’t. What happened to him after he took office is the part that should worry anyone rooting for Bodnar, Achilles, or Osborn to actually get somewhere if they win.

Once Rogers had the office, he governed like a man trying to balance a ledger. He vetoed spending bills the radicals in his own coalition wanted, ran the state efficiently, paid down debt, kept things orderly, and in doing all of that, became the kind of moderate his voters had just spent an election cycle rejecting.

The Fusionist legislature he presided over spent 1897 fighting itself instead of legislating, radicals against moderates against Silver Republicans, burning more energy on who would be the next U.S. Senator than on the platform that had elected them. They did pass one thing that mattered. The Barefoot Schoolboy Act equalized school funding between poor counties and rich ones, and it’s still worth remembering for that alone.

But one landmark law wasn’t what the base had been promised. Railroad regulation stalled. Tax reform stalled. The energy that swept Thurston County in November 1896 had nowhere to go by the spring of 1897 except sideways, into infighting, or backward, into disillusionment.

And then the ground under the whole revolt shifted for a reason that had nothing to do with any of them. Gold turned up in the Klondike in July 1897, and Seattle became the supply depot for the rush north. New gold flooding into circulation did quietly what Free Silver had been demanding all along, it loosened the money supply, and as it did, wheat and timber prices came back up. The debt trap that had radicalized a generation of farmers started closing on its own.

Then, in April 1898, the country went to war with Spain, and national attention swung hard toward patriotism and away from agrarian grievance, a mood Republicans used against the Populists by painting them as unstable at exactly the wrong moment. By the 1898 midterms, Thurston County had swung back to the Republicans in what the papers called a Redemption.

Which raises the question: What’s the Klondike this time? Is there some external shock sitting off in 2027 or 2028 that quietly resolves the affordability crisis fueling Bodnar and Osborn the way an accidental gold rush resolved the debt crisis fueling Rogers? Nobody running these 2026 campaigns knows, and neither do I. That’s the honest limit of the parallel. 1896 is a closed case with a known ending.

Washington already ran a version of this experiment once this cycle, and it didn’t work. A Spokane firefighter and Marine veteran named Nate Powell ran independent against Republican incumbent Michael Baumgartner in the state’s 5th District, arguing the real fight was top against bottom, not left against right. He came in third in the primary, well behind the Democrat, Carmela Conroy, who’s the one headed to November. Nobody cleared the field for him. The vessel doesn’t launch itself just because the conditions are right, and without a party willing to step aside first, sometimes the old label still beats the new one.

I can tell you the mechanism rhymes. I can’t tell you whether Bodnar governs like Rogers if he wins, moderate, disciplined, quietly disappointing to the people who put him there, or whether this cycle breaks differently. The pattern is real. The ending isn’t written.

There’s a name for what 1896 turned out to be a hinge of. It’s worth naming now that the shape of the thing is on the table instead of before. In the Strauss-Howe generational framework, 1896 sits at the exact point where a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era, resolves into a First Turning, a High. The three decades before it, stretching back to the Civil War, read as one long unresolved argument about who the country belonged to. McKinley’s win over Bryan didn’t just settle an election, it settled that argument, and industrial capitalism came out on top of agrarian populism for a generation. What’s easy to miss is that the losing side didn’t actually lose everything. The Progressive Era that followed spent the next two decades quietly building the very reforms Populists had demanded, in a form industrial capitalism could live with. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is Free Silver’s demand for flexible currency, granted seventeen years late.

That’s the pattern that later got a cleaner name, New Centrism, or pragmatic populism, and it isn’t the same thing as the neoliberal centrism of the 1990s that mostly told populist grievances to sit down. New Centrism absorbs the grievance instead of dismissing it. Regional decline, industrial hollowing out, a supply chain that snapped during a crisis, all of it gets folded into a stabilized version of statecraft rather than argued away. The 1890s version of that move ended in a central bank. Whatever 2026’s version ends in, reshored manufacturing, renewed antitrust legislation and enforcement, industrial policy with bipartisan cover, something else, it’ll probably look less like a revolution and more like the establishment quietly stealing the insurgents’ better ideas once the insurgents themselves are gone.

New Centrism matters now for the same reason William Butler Yeats was worried about the center when he wrote “The Second Coming,” in the six lines that begin “Things fall apart” and run through the line about the worst being full of passionate intensity.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We see the behavior change in politicians. The best don’t step up, and the arena gets more combative and less meaningful, because the center has literally moved, off from the space between the two parties toward something else. Like a black hole passing through a solar system, it pulls the planets off their old orbits.

Because of first-past-the-post elections, American politics keeps pulling back toward two durable party labels. We’re not a parliamentary system where a small party can live off the land until it achieves relevance. There’s no living off the land here. So there’s a clock on independents, and it runs until they change the political center enough that the parties themselves adapt.

Thurston County is also where you can watch this whole cycle at true scale, small enough to see the machinery. Total Republican sweep in 1894. Total Fusionist sweep in 1896. Total Republican Redemption by 1898. And it didn’t stop being a live pattern after 1898, either.

In 2016, an independent slate took over the Thurston County Commission the same way, riding local frustration with both establishment brands. None of these were permanent third-party breaks. They were bridges. The county used the independent label to force a conversation, and then the national parties, eventually, adapted enough to win the county back.

Whether 2026 independents are a version of Rogers, or something the pattern hasn’t produced before, isn’t a question history can answer in advance. What history can say is narrower and still worth saying.

When a party brand goes toxic enough, voters don’t abandon their actual demands, they just stop being willing to hear those demands from the party that’s carrying them. They reach for whatever vessel is clean enough to carry the argument instead, independent, fusion, whatever the label happens to be that decade. The vessel does its job either way. It breaks the deadlock. It forces the parties that lost the argument to go steal the winning ideas in private, a decade or two later, once nobody’s watching closely enough to call it surrender.

Maytown and the Long Tide

August 1, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Maytown was flooded before it had a name. Around 16,500 years ago an ice dam gave way, releasing a wall of meltwater that tore south across what would become southern Thurston County. This was the Tanwax Flood, one of the last violent acts of the Vashon Stade, and it did more than carve the ground. It wrote a script that everything afterward would follow.

The flood arrived at the tail end of the Fraser Glaciation, after the Puget Lobe had pushed as far south as Tenino and buried the site under some 200 meters of ice. When the ice began retreating and the climate warmed, the meltwater had nowhere easy to go, with the northern outlets still choked with ice. So the water was forced south instead, funneling through what is now the Chehalis River valley like water through a pinched hose. When the Tanwax dam broke, that pressure let go all at once. The surge swept across Rocky and Maytown prairies, dropping massive loads of sand, gravel, and boulders as it lost energy and spread out across the flats.

That single event set up the next 16,000 years. The flood left behind a rare glacial outwash prairie, flat and porous, resting on an estimated 20.6 million cubic yards of high-quality gravel. It carved broad paleochannels through the landscape too, the same low, open paths that railroads would later follow when they crisscrossed the county. The land was flat, well-drained, and full of raw material. That combination made it a target long before anyone thought to develop it. The flood didn’t just shape Maytown’s geology. It built the site’s entire future resume: a place suited for transit, for extraction, for anything that needed wide open space and didn’t mind a little distance from town.

For millennia, that resume sat as grass and gravel under an open sky. Then, in the 1940s, the tide came back in, this time manmade.

The Pacific Powder Co. began acquiring and leasing land at Maytown in the 1940s to manufacture dynamite, drawn by the same flatness and isolation that had once channeled glacial meltwater. By 1964 the operation had grown enough that the Hercules Powder Co. bought the property outright, expanding it to roughly 1,625 acres. For the next several decades, the plant was one of the region’s main suppliers of explosives for the roads, tunnels, and dams going up across the Pacific Northwest. Workers handled nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and ammonium nitrate with sparkless tools, dressed in specialized clothing, working to the sound of music piped in to mask the tension of the place.

That tension broke loose more than once. An explosion leveled a gun cotton storage house in January 1954, killing a workman named Amos George Owens. Three years later, in January 1957, a blast at the nitro facility killed 31-year-old Earl Thomas Riggs. The danger wasn’t contained to the plant grounds either. One of the company’s trucks exploded in Roseburg, Oregon, in 1959, killing 13 people and leading to an indictment of Pacific Powder Co. for involuntary manslaughter. Even after Hercules took over, the risk didn’t disappear. A 1967 explosion in a spent acid line did enough damage to shut the whole plant down for repairs.

By the time the operation wound down, the plant had left more than memories behind. Decades of manufacturing had worked lead, asbestos, petroleum products, and the carcinogen dinitrotoluene into the soil and groundwater, a kind of silt that stayed long after the industrial tide had gone out. Citifor removed more than 9,000 tons of contaminated soil in 2006 alone, and the Port of Tacoma later excavated 20 million tons more. Even with all that work, the Department of Ecology still ranked the property a high-risk hazardous waste site in the early 2000s. The powder works was gone. Its residue had settled in for good.

Before the water fully receded from the industrial era, one more wave broke over Maytown, and this one had nothing to do with commerce.

In late August 1969, the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair took over the Rainier Hereford Ranch next door to the powder works, close enough to share its dust. Nearly 30,000 people showed up for a lineup that included Steve Miller and Country Joe and the Fish, modeled loosely on the original Sky River festival and on Woodstock. It was a rogue wave, sudden and enormous, cresting over a cattle ranch for a few days before pulling back out just as fast.

The surge met resistance almost immediately. Local residents organized as the Stop the Rock Festival Committee, led by a member of the John Birch Society. Their objections went well past noise. They worried openly about the organizers’ sympathies with the Black Panthers and what they called the glorification of communist movements. Legal challenges even argued that the music itself would cause nearby cattle to lose flesh from the stress. Once the festival was underway, open nudity and drug use gave the opposition more to point at, and the Catholic Archdiocese ran newspaper ads with photos of topless attendees, hoping to shock the public into demanding prosecutions.

The backlash outlasted the festival by years. The Thurston County Commission responded with strict new ordinances that effectively banned festival camping, building a legal dike meant to keep that particular kind of flood from ever rising again. It worked. Nothing like Sky River has happened at Maytown since.

The Thurston County Commission wasn’t done caring about what happened on that stretch of glacial outwash prairie.

What followed instead was a slower, more bureaucratic kind of tide, rising and falling in ambition rather than water.

In 2006, the Port of Tacoma bought 745 acres of the old munitions site for $21.25 million, aiming to build the South Sound Logistics Center, a rail-served depot that would let cargo skip past I-5 gridlock. This was a sort of realization of the vision of the nearby Maytown townsite, founded as a community on the confluence of railroads.

Because a port can’t operate inside another port’s territory without permission, Tacoma entered an interlocal agreement with the Port of Olympia to develop it jointly. That agreement collapsed in 2008, after pressure from local residents and the group Friends of Rocky Prairie pushed Olympia to withdraw.

The Port tried again in 2010, agreeing to sell the land to Maytown Sand and Gravel. Thurston County officials were accused of deliberately stalling the permits needed to close that sale. The resulting lawsuit worked its way to the Washington State Supreme Court by 2018. The court found that the county had violated the company’s due process rights, and the evidence suggested commissioners had pressured staff to manufacture an emergency just to slow the project down. A jury had already awarded $12 million in damages, split between the Port and the gravel company.

Even with that ruling in hand, the current kept shifting. NorthPoint Development offered $24.8 million in 2018 for a 2.9-million-square-foot logistics complex, only to see the deal collapse in 2021 when Thurston County denied the zoning change it needed. Each attempt followed the same pattern: ambition rising, hitting the wall of local opposition or legal obstruction, then receding again, leaving the land untouched but the fight a little more scarred.

The most recent agreement, a purchase deal with Miles Sand & Gravel signed in 2026 for $17.25 million, marks the lowest water mark yet. There’s no warehouse complex in this version, no attempt to reroute regional cargo through the prairie. The plan now is simpler and, in a way, more honest about what the land has always been for: extract the 20.6 million cubic yards of gravel the Tanwax Flood left behind 16,500 years ago. Before settling on Miles, the Port gave the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife first chance to buy the property and fold it into the adjacent wildlife area. The two sides couldn’t agree on a price. Friends of Rocky Prairie is left hoping the new owners honor the reclamation plans already on the books, which call for eventually turning the mined land into ponds and wildlife habitat.

Maytown isn’t a ghost town in the usual sense. It never had enough of a boom to leave behind the kind of emptiness that label implies. What it has instead is a long record of being processed, first by ice, then by dynamite, then by rock music and public outrage, then by lawsuits and zoning boards. Each wave has left its own layer of sediment on top of the last: some of it gravel, some of it legal precedent, some of it toxic residue still being dug out of the ground.

The current plan is to mine the very material the original flood put there, then hand the emptied land back to the prairie it once buried. Whether that actually happens is still an open question. Given the site’s history, the safest bet is that it’s less an ending than another recession, and that somewhere downstream, another wave of ambition is already gathering.