Category: Olympia history (Page 2 of 10)

I originally read this as a part of an episode of the Olympia Standard about a year and a half ago.

If you’re a well-informed Olympian, you’re probably familiar with Olympia’s Depression-era “Little Hollywood,” a shack town that existed in the 1930s. Its name was likely an ironic nod to the bustling Los Angeles suburb already then at the heart of the movie industry.

You might also know that Little Hollywood was torn down in the early 1940s to make way for Capital Lake, as most of it consisted of float houses anchored in the old Deschutes Estuary.

But let’s rewind to 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Olympia hosted what could be called a proto-Capital Lakefair, known as the “Pagan Frolic.” The event included the crowning of Queen Juno and Dan Cupid.

Dick Abram, a contestant in an old-time fiddle contest at what was then known as Priest Point Park, didn’t win first place (which would have earned him $10) or second (a new fiddle). Abram, an itinerant cabinet maker, was living in the old wooden Washington School at Legion and Eastside, the site of what is now the Old Armory. In fact, he lived there until construction workers nearly demolished the building before moving to Little Hollywood.

It was then that Abram became the unofficial “mayor” of Little Hollywood. He rallied shacktown residents to ensure they were counted in the 1940 census.

Though Abram wasn’t originally from Olympia, he was born outside Akron, Ohio, and had lived in Texas and Nova Scotia, he eventually made Olympia his home. He was widowed in 1932 while living in the city.

Abram’s life ended tragically on Christmas Day in 1943, when he was struck by a car near the corner of Fourth and Cherry, where city hall now is. His death was the culmination of years of hardship. As the “mayor” of Olympia’s largest and longest-standing homeless encampment, which was then known as a “shack town” or “Hooverville,” Abram’s life embodied the struggles faced by many during the Great Depression.

In 1937, Olympia residents began to push back against the presence of Little Hollywood. When a local real estate broker first complained about the shack town’s residents living on public land, the city attorney drafted an ordinance to remove them. However, it wasn’t until 1942 that Little Hollywood was completely cleared out, with its float houses and shacks burned to the ground. Abram was forced to move, and his new residence was an unknown address somewhere “north” of Olympia.

Then people started hitting Abram with their cars.

In the following year, 1943, while walking downtown, Abram was struck by a car being driven by another human twice. The second time he died. On Christmas Day, a 20-year-old driver didn’t to see Abram crossing the intersection. The driver turned himself in at the police station but was cleared by the coroner, who determined that Abram had stepped out too quickly and that the driver was not at fault.

Behind Abram’s death were civic efforts to disband Little Hollywood and to resist the construction of low-income housing in Olympia.

At the same time forces were aiming at Little Hollywood, the federal government had offered half a million dollars to fund housing, but Mayor Truman Trullinger and his “Olympia Housing Committee” rejected the offer. Three days later, Trullinger announced the final destruction of Little Hollywood. Despite acknowledging a housing shortage, especially for individuals like Abram, the city opted not to accept the federal funding.

Today, the events surrounding Dick Abram’s life, from his role in Little Hollywood to his death, are largely forgotten in Olympia’s collective memory. But the path taken by those involved, the fiddlers at the Pagan Frolic, the mayors, and the lost half-million dollars for public housing, shaped our community in ways we still feel today. This isn’t just a story about the ongoing struggle with homelessness; it’s a story about Abram’s journey through Olympia. He came to the city, found a home, led his community, and played the fiddle. He was removed by the city and died as a result of those circumstances, with a federal housing offer turned down by the very officials who could have given him a better future.

We’ll leave it there. We have enough discussions ahead about how we continue to avoid the tragic circumstances of Dick Abram’s death. But rest assured, there are still “Mayor Dick Abrams” in Olympia, because we have too much of “Mayor Truman Trullinger” in our community.

As roads go, Sixty-Five Road is a short one. On Olympia’s far Westside, it covers the gap between 20th Avenue NW and 14th Avenue NW. If you’ve ever been out to Hansen Elementary or Marshall Middle, that’s the road you’ve been on. It also serves as the western boarder to the Goldcrest Neighborhood and the eastern line of the Homeport Apartments.

For a boring name, it is also a very unique name. As a writer in the Olympian (who was exploring interesting place names) quipped in the 1980s: “Where, one wonders, are the other 64 roads?” Where, indeed.

That question leads us to the first clue in the origin of the name: it was likely a left-over from a defunct road classification system. For example, for 4th Avenue in Olympia, even if it wasn’t there, we’d assume the next most southern street is 5th. And, even though State Avenue is the one immediately north, we can safely assume at one point it was called 3rd. And, six blocks south of 4th is 10th. And, so on.

But, for Sixty-Five Road, there are no other north-to-south running roads with similar names.

But, let’s start at the beginning of the road’s history.

In Resolution 2833, the Thurston County Commission officially named in August 1961:

I find a couple of interesting things about this:

1. It is just “Sixty-Five Road,” not “the Sixty-Five Road.” And, even though its presentation has changed over the year to include the number swapped (Road Sixty-Five) or turned into numerals and swapped (Road 65), it started out as written out.
   
2. Currently, the southern end of Sixty-Five Road is 14th, but if you go east far enough, it becomes Walnut. In those days, Walnut was the name of the road all the way to that part of town.

So, here is our first clue about an archaic road numbering system. This is a legal ad from 1970:

Since we know Walnut was the name of 14th when Sixty-Five road was named, we can assume “County Road No. 65” was also another name it was called. I’m assuming “County Road No. 65” was the official engineers’ name for the road, which was shortened in common use to “Sixty-Five Road” by the time it was officially named.

One of my favorite examples of this change in construction over time was the original name for Boulevard Road on Olympia’s Eastside, which was “Grand Boulevard.”

So, what we would need to find would be another reference to a “County Road No. xx” in the decades before the 1960s.

Here is what I found in 1937:

County Road No. 298 was definitely a thing that existed in Thurston County. I’m not sure exactly where, but there was at one point a numbering system for county roads with that construction.

There is an additional reference I found from 1912 with the construction “county highway No. x”

So there you go, where are all the other 64 or 297 roads indeed?

Lastly, I want to address the broader thoughts Dave brings up earlier in his piece.

The most grievous was the hubris of cultural superiority, originating in the ethos of his time and civilization. This pattern was so common that Pope Francis is coming to North America this year in recognition of this Truth in the interest of Reconciliation.

Before we judge Ricard too severely, forbid that any of us should be judged for our actions by the standards of some future posterity.

This is exactly how we should be judged. And this is the entire reason I study history. It is cliché to say that thing about repeating history when you don’t learn it well enough. And I don’t think it’s an extreme statement that we still have a lot of divergent ideas about the place of religious minorities in America.

Nicandri’s “judged by our current actions by a better future” is a tamed down version of “if we pull these statues down, we’ll forget our history.” There is a big difference between honoring something by naming a park after it or building a statue and “forgetting history.” We don’t build statues to assassins, for example, but we do include them in our history. We aren’t taking “Olympia’s Forgotten Pioneers” out of the library and burning it. We are simply showing that we have a better understanding of history because we no longer want to honor religious colonialism. 

While what could be done to help Indian people in the 1850s may have been morally complex to French priests, we have the luxury of clearer vision. Nicandri in “Olympia’s Forgotten Pioneers”:

I am grateful for the work Anna Schlect and Russel Lidman put into researching the Gov. John R. Rogers. I went on a Rogers reading kick last fall, and learned a lot about Washington’s only third-party governor. The time he lived in and who he was are fascinating. But I am ashamed I never came across the anti-Semitic quote they did.

And I would like to join them in calling for the removal of the John R. Rogers statue from Sylvester Park. Governor Rogers’ is best known for his support of the “Barefoot Schoolboy” bill that expanded education in Washington before Rogers himself became governor.

Schlect and Lidman point to other parts of his legacy we should consider:

As in the attached excerpts from Rogers’ book, “The Irrepressible Conflict or the American System of Money” (John R. Rogers & Company Publishers, Puyallup, 1892), he was unambiguously clear who he blamed for the woes of the U.S. economy: Jews.

To cite excerpts from this book, Rogers wrote, “Gold is shipped to Europe and the ability of our people to buy and sell or exchange labor and the products of our labor is to be still further reduced by making all money scarcer and harder to get. The excuse offered is “Europe wants our gold.’ And because Europe — or the Jewish Money Lords of the world — can thus interfere in American trade and take from the American laborer his opportunity to labor …”

I want to split my argument up into two short points and a much longer argument.

1. We don’t have to go very far here, that Gov. Rogers was an anti-Semite disqualifies him from being the subject of a statue on our town square. It doesn’t matter to me at all that because of our status as a state capital, that our town square also happens to be state property. He believed the Jewish people to be behind a world-wide financial conspiracy to hold down mankind. Whatever else Gov. Rogers did does not earn him a statue.

2. The statue was built in a moment of high political emotion in Washington. Gov. Rogers died quickly and while he was still in office. Have you ever heard the phrase, don’t make decisions when you’re angry? The same should go for statues. Don’t build statues for people right after they die.

3. And yes, we absolutely can take into consideration someone’s era to judge them today. To do that, we need a much better understanding of Rogers beyond one bill he helped pass before he was Governor.

But let’s unpack this argument a little before we go too far. Oftentimes you’ll hear people excuse slaveholder founding fathers. That their other non-slave-holding activities excused any actual slave holding that they did. I think we should consider the entire person. But we need to focus on the sins, not brush past them on our way to build or defend statues. 

In the case of the slaveholder, we need to focus on  our society once allowing human bondage. We always have ties to our past, and we need to explore those ties. For example, do you have less expensive insurance now because an insurance company in the 1800s was able to make a bank on the slave trade? 

History isn’t wiped clean when we are born or when we moved to a place. History has inertia that carries us in our own lives. We need to recognize how that inertia delivered us to our current station and where it is taking us. So, slave holding or anti-Semitism are part of who we are now because our history contains them. We owe a fealty to our history and our neighbors. And because we’re all trying to get better, we need to know where we came from. We need to use what power we have to redirect history towards equity.

It is ironic for this argument to be occurring around Rogers’ legacy when it is clear where he would stand. One of Rogers’ favorite quotes was Thomas Jefferson’s: “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have no right or power over it.”

It is as if Rogers himself is telling us we don’t owe him a statue. We owe ourselves a decent education of our community and where we’re coming from, but a statue does not help that. A statue is an honor.

So, we need to know the entire Gov. John R. Rogers, not just the man in a statue who sent Barefoot Schoolboys to school. Gov. Rogers’ life carries through a problematic era of our state’s history that we can and should continue to draw lessons from. Most importantly, it shows how the striving for purity of political philosophy, against the actual needs of people at the moment, is actually evil.

Despite being remembered as a sort of big-government progressive, Rogers’ actual political philosophy was “individualism,” something like today’s libertarianism. His political philosophy was shadowed by the accomplishment that we honor him for. Although he came to power as a member of the then ascendant Populist movement, he was a member of the right-wing of the Populist movement.

Rogers’ right-wing populism falls within the bounds of populism because it emphasizes the anti-institutional, and pro-individual strain of populism. To be populist, you don’t just need to bring up the many (as they argued), you need to bring down the few. Now you can also see that his anti-Semitism is not a weird outlier in his political beliefs.

Where we see strains of the Populist movement still in Washington politics are in the existence of port districts, which were meant to dilute the railroads control of the waterfront. We also still see it in our tendency towards open primaries, which dilute the power of political parties. We see it in the initiative and referendum processes, which dilute the power of the legislature. 

But, we also need to center Rogers into the Populist political movement, which included several efforts to forcefully remove residents of Chinese descent from our communities. Quaintly called “Chinese expulsions,” riots in the 1880s and 1890s broke out in Washington cities, and force Chinese residents out of town.

There is definitely a connection between the Knights of Labor that attempted to drive all Chinese from Washington in the 1880s and the populists 10 years later. But the relationship I can best describe it is a “hands off” one. The Populists in Rogers’ cadre drew on the same support that the Knights drew from, but did not stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. By the time John R. Rogers led the populist ticket that united some Democrats, some Republicans and a lot of Progressives to take state government in 1896, the political inertia that started with the Chinese expulsions 10 years early was dissipating. 

This does not excuse Rogers, but it underlines how complicated the progressive movement was. It is worth noting that Roger was also a member of the Greenback Party when he lived in Kansas. That party had a strong “send the Chinese back to China” platform.

Local populists also had complicated relationships with American politics, some of them praising the former Confederacy. More broadly, many of the most prominent populists across the country of the era were in fact former Confederates.

This entire broader view of progressivism at the latter part of the 19th century, when put in context, helps explain Rogers. It also puts the era into the much deeper political context of the Oregon black exclusion laws and the racial battle lines in Southwest Washington during the Wobbly labor wars. That racial animus was contained by progressive economic arguments does excuse it.

But it also helps us look our own politics today. There are many places in our state that brush past our obvious issues with race. There are a lot of arguments we’re having about economics and race that some arguers would like to remove race from entirely. By looking Rogers straight in the eyes, we can see our arguments more clearly. And also our path forward, hopefully.

This hopefully also brings forward a public conversation about who exactly we can honor with a statue if we have to take their historical context into consideration. Maybe no one, but I doubt that.

Rogers is only the lowest of hanging fruit in Olympia. We need to reconsider Washington on street signs and schools, Wilson on the street I grew up on, and Thurston for our entire county. But we can take care of Rogers’ first. It’ll be easy, it’s just a statue.

One of the most interesting, long-term and simmering debates in Olympia, is how several dozen blocks in SW Olympia are connected to the rest of the city.

Southwest Olympia south of Division and east of the mall is an interesting place. Unlike anywhere else in the city, they are unusually cut off from the rest of the city. Other than 9th Avenue and 4th Avenue, there is really no way to access much of the Southwest side neighborhood.

But, like a lot of things you’ll read on my blog anymore, it wasn’t always that way.

It turns out that the weirdest little street on the westside, Caton Way, which juts northeast from near 9th and Lee street for half a block is actually the last portion of an old county road that had connected the westside with the rest of the county.

Black Lake Way can be seen plainly here in this 1945 plat map:

In the 1937 version of the westside map, Blake Lake Way is the primary route out of west Olympia.