Category: Olympia history (Page 3 of 9)

Ghettos and lost quadplexes at Nut Tree Loop: Our conversations 40 years ago around multifamily housing and how we got here

August 4, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

If you go up Eastside Street from downtown, it will eventually curve to the east and become 22nd Avenue. As 22nd Avenue approaches Boulevard, there is a small neighborhood on the left-hand side of the road called Nut Tree Loop.

This area around 22nd, Cain Road and Boulevard was the neighborhood I grew up in. I was born in 1976, so in my mind’s eye, I kind of remember Nut Tree Loop being built in the late 70s. And, I’ve always thought about it as a much nicer neighborhood surrounded by blocks of split-level ranch homes and older craftsmen. I think if you take a walk through Nut Tree now, that impression by Kid Emmett still holds true. Two homes recently sold in there for over $700,000 (in 2017) and $800,000 (last May).

So then, I was startled to find out when Dan Beuhler first envisioned Nut Tree Loop in 1976, he sketched out a neighborhood of 21 fourplexes “across one section of landscaped grounds.” Beuhler had already built a smaller development of apartments around the corner from Nut Tree. At the time called Eidleweiss, they are currently known at the Chateau Townhomes.

Where 40 or so nicer single-family homes now sit, 84 multi-family units would have been built, if Beuhler got his way. But instead, the Nut Tree fourplexes kicked off several years of debate in Olympia around multi-family housing, the results of which are still felt today.

And the nature of those conversations tells us a lot about why Olympia shut down the development of smaller multi-family housing since the 1980s.

I’ve written about this period of history in Olympia before. First I tracked the sharp decline in small multifamily housing in Olympia since an explosion in the mid-70s. Second, I took a look at zoning maps since the 1960s to the current day and found a declining area that allowed anything but single-family homes. Lastly, I charted the sprawl of single-family homes that resulted since Olympia downzoned.

In this look, I want to explore how we were talking about the change in the city that at one point allowed duplexes and small apartments and then outlawed them.

Beuhler’s proposal set off a series of contentious public meetings where the city planning commission (on which Beuhler inexplicably sat) decided the fate of the Nut Tree quadplexes. Over 500 individual Olympian’s testified to the city planning commission and the city commission itself (Olympia was not yet governed by a city council).

Times were tense when the city commission finally took up the Nut Tree fourplexes. When one city commissioner pointed out that in the late 70s incomes were not increasing at the same rate as the price of a single-family home and therefore it made sense to allow for denser, more affordable options in new construction, an audience member shouted: “Why don’t you move to New York?”

New York in the 1970s not necessarily being an example of a humming urban community. This fear of the urban, the denser and poorer community coming into newer single-family neighborhoods underlined the public debate around Nut Tree. While most of the top-line conversation was simply about the power of zoning and the expectations of homeowners that their newer neighbors would have the same zoning, when you dug down, you go the fear of the urban.

Facing that level of fire over one development was not something the city commission had experienced before, and they quickly put the Nut Tree quadplexes on the shelf.

After Nut Tree Loop, the city took a step back and began to examine multifamily housing across the city. The Citizen’s Multi-Family Housing Taskforce began meeting in January 1978 and worked throughout the spring and summer to deliver a zoning package to the city council.

But, like Nut Tree along 22nd, this proposal met with fierce opposition across the city.

As the city considered a plan that would expand multifamily housing throughout the city (even further than the citizen’s taskforce had intended), an unsigned editorial in the Olympian captured the mood of those opposed to denser housing: It isn’t our job to look after anyone but families and experts that disagree with us are bad.

Those who participated in seven months of hearings by the task force evidently want nothing of the philosophy that holds a community responsible for providing the kinds mixed housing needed by today’s mixed lifestyles — the singles, the elderly and the divorced for instance.

The planners are coming at the problem as theoreticians, as we see it, and they’re not handling the grassroots thinking very well at all… The latest effort to insert recommendations into a citizens report had too much of the smell of “we know what’s best for you” thinking about it.

The commission approved plans that would, on the one hand, allow multi-family housing, but, on the other, only after it was approved on a case-by-case basis. Even then, the economic class of the folks sitting on the Task Force was brought up.

From the city commission minutes in August 1978:

Paul Sparks said his concern is that we would be isolating the lower income families to certain areas away from services and from the city center. The people who are most affected by (the multi-family plan) were not involved on the Task Force.

Two unidentified women then entered into a heated discussion about the makeup of the Task Force, one asking how come low income people had not been considered and involved; the other replying the Planning Commission has asked for volunteers to serve on the Task Force and all this was in the papers and the radio.

The city commission passed a version of the Task Force recommendations, but they failed to turn on the spigot of multi-family housing.

By 1980, the planning commission had again passed a package that would expand multi-family housing across the city. The idea would have been in the early 80s to allow multifamily housing in all areas of Olympia, essentially banning single-family zoning.

And, again the residents of single-family neighborhoods stood up.

Multi-family housing in otherwise single-family neighborhoods will foster “the diverse kind of community that makes this community interesting and makes it rich,” (Raven Lidman) said.

She said when it comes to the good points of living in single-family neighborhoods, “tenants have those same desires.”

But Virginia Baxter, speaking after Lidman, said “The existing inviting neighborhoods will be destroyed, and there will be an exodus of homeowners” if multi-family housing comes to neighborhoods.

…

But Susan Hirst, protesting the proposal, said that multi-family renters will not gain much by being located inside single-family neighborhoods.

They will still be living in apartments, she said, and “you will simply be placing them into a neighborhood where other people have” the style of life the renters want.

But you have to look no further than Bill Grout to find the dark corner of the urbanism discussion in 1980 Olympia. In one article on the 1980 multi-family plan:

“You have increased police activity, increased crime, increased vandalism,” with multi-family housing, said Bill Grout.

Later that summer, as the city commission itself considered the plan, Grout crossed swords with a county leader in a discussion that might as well come out of our current conversation about Missing Middle housing:

Bill Grout, who said he represents Olympia’s homeowners, labeled the proposal one which “would turn Olympia into a ghetto.”

…

(County Commissioner George Barner) said the measure would build up the dwindling rental housing market and would enable low income and young persons to afford a place to live.

He said such housing should be encouraged in the urban areas because most conveniences are located there. He added it would also prevent urban housing sprawl.

Grout contradicted Barner, saying out that multi-family housing would drive down property values in single-family residential areas because renters generally do not take care of their property.

And, so the city turned the proposal down. Not actually turned it down, but rather just put it back on the shelf. A year later the city would approve a townhome ordinance that would allow a certain kind of multifamily housing throughout the city, though one that seemingly favored homeowners.

But, the time of multi-family housing tracking with population increase was over. Olympia would go through several incremental downzones to tighten up single-family zoning areas through the 80s and 90s

We used to tear down houses to build more houses. Until we didn’t

November 3, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The most telling passage for me in this incredibly bad attempted takedown of sensible housing proposals in Olympia was this:

If you live in one of the older, near-town Olympia neighborhoods, big changes are looming for your neighborhood.

The way Jay Elder presents this is if to imply that this threat to older homes near the center of a city is new. That developers are just now getting around to licking their chops on older homes, after having developed all the old farms and ranches outside town.

But in fact this is the opposite of what has always happened in Olympia. It has only been in the last few decades that “older, near town Olympia neighborhoods” have been protected from development pressures. I’ve written about the history of downzoning in Olympia. This is the process of taking what used to be areas zoned for higher density and putting it into a lower density. These processes in the late 70s through the 90s specifically protected near-town Olympia neighborhoods.

What happened after these downzones was that new housing was placed in areas that didn’t already have housing, such as old farms and ranches and forests. We protected older neighborhoods, we sprawled.

But, it hasn’t always been this way. It used to be in Olympia that as our city grew, we traded lower density, single family blocks for higher density blocks. This process has been going on for so long that some of these higher density blocks are now considered historic themselves.

The Weidner Auto Court on the north end of downtown is a great example of this process. The then hotel was built in 1929 on the site of a handful of single family homes. You can see these homes in an overlay of the 1924 Sanborn map:

One of the houses that we lost to what is now an apartment building belonged to Louis Ouellette. I can’t find a picture of that particular house, but the man himself seemed pretty impressive. He was the surveyor general for the county and he founded the Puget Sound and Chehalis Railway. Not no one but also not someone whose house was saved when it was time to change.

I cant’t even find a photo of the Ouellette house online anywhere. When people think of old tragedies, houses and places we’ve lost (like the myth of I-5 destroying downtown Tumwater), I don’t hear people pining for the Oullette house. And now we look at the the auto court building itself as something historic that needs to be preserved.

My favorite example is the Columbia Manor Apartments one block over. In this overlay of that block you see a much larger home on the site of the 1939 apartments:

This was the Gowley house, which at at moment in history, was a historic home. It was an unofficial governor’s mansion, Gowley himself was an important statewide leader, his wife was a “Mercer girl” and he died oversees where he was serving as the consul general to Japan.

It was also an impressive looking house. From the Washington State Historical Society:

Any of those things would have qualified it to be saved today. But, in 1939 the house was gone (no one really knows the circumstances of its razing) and now we have 10 apartments for 10 families when once we had one house for one (wealthy) family.

When we freeze neighborhoods in time, when we throw around words like “established” to prevent opportunities for more housing for more families, we don’t allow our city to move forward. It is also deliberate ignorance of how our city has always developed. Nearby, lower density neighborhoods used to always get more dense.

We already know that “tear-downs” are happening in Olympia and Thurston County. But instead of being replaced by higher density developments in the past, we’re replacing older, more affordable single family homes with newer, more expensive, single family homes:

The single largest category of tear-downs in this analysis (which also includes Lacey and Tumwater) were single family homes replaced by newer single family homes. Older homes are going to get rebuilt by someone, someday. We might as well follow the traditional way of allowing older, closer in neighborhoods to become more dense.

What happened after we downzoned and the middle went missing in Olympia?

May 22, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

In the last post I showed how a series of zoning changes in the 1980s and 1990s

But Olympia continued to grow. Where did all those people move?

It seems obvious to point out, but they moved it mostly single-family zoned neighborhoods.

More people came to Olympia, so if we weren’t getting denser, we sprawled. This map shows every parcel that had a new structure in residential type (even including multi-family) after the 1988 downzone. I pieced it together from a series of webmaps from the Thurston Geodata Center.

Instead of densifying the places where we’d already built, we expanded our footprint over the last few decades, cutting down more trees, paving over more open land. People continued to move into town, and as our interior neighborhoods “stabilized,” new neighborhoods continued to be cut out of the woods and farms around Olympia.

Here is the Google engine timelapse from 1984 to today, you can see the exact same thing.

Southeast Olympia:

Westside:

I hope this doesn’t really need pointing out, but if we’re worried about the impact of new growth or preserving natural resources, we would be concerned about sprawl. Again, not new news guys.

From City Observatory:

Cities incur substantial expenses to build roads, transit systems and parks to enable development in a neighborhood. Downzoning automatically increases the per capita costs of all of those investments, because each road, park and bus line can serve fewer people. It also pushes additional development to the urban fringe, where some municipality must build entirely new infrastructure at high cost, and where not incidentally individual households will have to drive more, creating more pollution and congestion plus incurring more transportation costs. Ultimately, downzoning is a recipe for more sprawl: if you can’t build as many apartments, you’ve got to build more single family homes, and you’ll end up consuming a lot more land in the process.

Even if the new roads and utilities we used to enable the post-downzone sprawl was paid for at one point with impact fees, we designed a system to fail. The impact fees only pay for the initial setup of these road and utility systems. Eventually, they’ll reach the end of their useful lives and we’ll have to pay to replace them. At that point, we’ve cooked into our zoning a limit on how many taxpayers will be on the hook to replace them. We’re essentially pushing the expense of low-density, unwalkable single-family neighborhoods onto the next generation.

When Olympia downzoned and gentrified

May 21, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

In the early 1960s and through the 1970s, most of Olympia’s residential neighborhoods allowed housing types that are now included in the city’s Missing Middle proposal. The most common of these zones was the RD (Duplex) zone that allowed for single-family homes and duplexes in the same neighborhood. In various generations of Olympia zoning codes, this later became known as R2 and then R 6-12 (meaning six to twelve dwellings per acre).

In an earlier post, I pointed out how Olympia (and Thurston County) saw its largest influx of new residents in the late-70s. Even the yearly migration of today does not match the spike in new residents between 1977 and 1979. Before and during the 1970s, the construction of 2-4 unit housing pretty much tracked with population growth in Olympia, but in the early 80s, they became unhinged.

This is because Olympia downzoned a series of once density friendly neighborhoods, pushing new growth into largely single-family home zoned neighborhoods on the fringe of the city.

Through the 80s and 90s and to today, the city decreased to the area duplex-friendly zoning covered. This led to examples of places where duplexes had been built, but they weren’t actually technically allowed by the zoning rules. In fact, because of persistent downzoning in recent decades, there are literally hundreds of examples of non-conforming missing middle housing throughout the city.

According to the city’s tally, there are over 200 non-conforming duplexes, 462 non-conforming tri/fourplex units, and 89 non-conforming 5-12 unit apartments. All of these were allowed under zoning rules when they were built, but the rules changed over time.

Here is a great example of two non-conforming duplexes at Legion that were allowed in 1978, but not a few years later:

It’s worth your time to watch how the zoning maps changed over time. In 1962, the Eastside duplex zone stretched from Eastside up to McCormick.

Then twenty years later (as R-2 zoning), it became much smaller, stretching only to Boundary.

In 1994 it expanded again, but..

It (this time as R 6-12) shrunk back down in 1995 through to today.

We can see the same thing on the Westside. The duplex zone dominated most of the hillside over there in the 1960s and 70s.

Then in the early 80s, the zone shrunk as most of the area downzoned.

And, again in 1994…

But in 1995, the area for duplexes expanded again, taking back a bit of what it used to be.

The most interesting downzone example was in 1988 when the city, downzoned a portion of each of these neighborhoods from a zone that would allow duplexes to a single-family home only zoning.

There is nearly zero coverage of the 1988 downzone, the only real reference I found to it was in the city minutes. It seems odd to me that of the 18 people that testified on the downzone, 13 were against it. Despite the opposition, the massive downzone went from the planning commision to approval by the city council in four short months.

Here is a map of the downzoned areas:

According to the ordinance, the reason for the downzone was to align the zoning in those neighborhoods with this policy in the then Comprehensive Plan: “Older neighborhoods which are predominantly single family should be zoned single family to encourage home ownership and rehabilitation.”

In terms of how people remember downzones of that era, this checks out. Here is Jim Keogh talking about the Eastside:

The neighborhood stabilized. It became nicer. It also (seemingly) became more expensive.

Taken from a different perspective, what happened to the Eastside is called gentrification.

Jim doesn’t really go into why this would happen, but it seems like once you stop allowing more residents to move into a neighborhood and make housing the more exclusive, the neighborhood becomes more ~~gentile~~ genteel.

The result of this sort of zoning experiment would be a mystery if we haven’t seen it play out on a grand scale across the country. For example, Los Angeles conducted this sort of downzoning writ-large over the same timescale as Olympia:

The city of Los Angeles has tested this theory by downzoning
the city to permit fewer dwellings. In 1960, the city was
zoned to support 10 million people. By contrast, today the
city is zoned to support only 4.3 million people — just slightly
more than its current population. So if excluding housing made housing cheaper, Los Angeles
land prices would have fallen, causing rents to fall. And
yet rents, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 55 percent,
while median renter income has grown by only 13 percent. Rather than declining, land prices quintupled, from just over
$86,229 per house in 1984 to $483,692 in 2014.

Less access to housing over a finite area leads to a higher cost to access that housing. Seems pretty simple. The purpose and the result of the downzoning in Olympia was the gentrification that we’ve seen over the last few decades. Rather than allowing the neighborhoods to absorb the growth that was coming, we allowed it to do something totally different.

Notes on the impact of alcohol, prohibition and Thurston County

November 17, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I was supposed to give a short talk in front of a History Happy Hour earlier this year. At the very last moment I had to beg off, but I really appreciate Len Balli and the folks at the Washington State Historical Society thinking of me. Just to be invited was pretty cool. You guys do good work.

Seriously, just an aside: organizations like the Washington State Historical Society (and libraries, local historical societies, history magazines and museums) are so vital. So vital. If you aren’t doing much to take advantage of what they have to give and provide them with love and support, I wish you would.

So, without further discussion, here is what I was going to talk about:

At two o’clock on a Thursday morning in early April 1913 in Bucoda Murvil Lancaster was home, alone, with her baby when Charles James came crashing into the house. She was probably asleep, finding a few hours of rest between keeping her baby happy and running the household.

Or, maybe she was already awake, walking her child, feeding her child.

But, James smashed the early morning peace, smashing furniture and other (as the newspapers said) household goods.

Charles James was looking for his wife.

Mrs. James had already abandoned the family home in south Thurston County, and Charles had come looking for her. He was obviously already well down the road of intoxication, well lubricated as we might say, with enough drunken enthusiasm to invade a neighbor’s house.

Similar to the Thursday morning when he smashed up the Lancaster House, Charles had already beaten his wife. He’d taken his fists to her at their own house to the point that she “quit the household” with the help of neighbors

The common thread here was that Charles James drank too much. And, when he drank too much, be became violent.

What Mr. James did was not considered a discrete family affair. Domestic violence, fueled by alcohol (like today) was an important public conversation.

But, in a lot of ways, to a lot of people, it was THE public policy discussion of the day. Charles James might be violent. But, should the government allow the sale of the fuel for Charles James violence?

Let’s pull the focus out of Bucoda
Washington has always had alcohol. The Union Brewery was established well before statehood and was the origin-point of Northwest Hops in sat right in the heart of downtown Olympia.

But, almost as soon, we have had the battle between wet and dry politicians. It was one aspect of the urban/rural split. Urban areas were wet, rural areas (in general) dry.

In the early 1890s a dry meeting in Olympia became so crowded so fast that the intended segregation of men and women could not be accomplished. The energetic talks of national prohibitionist speakers was slightly marred by men and women sitting together in the crowd. The organizers promised that future events would be better organized and men and women would be separated.

By the time Charles James began beating his wife and tearing apart neighbors’ homes, the forces of dry had already begun turning the tide in Washington.

A local dry option law was passed, and Thurston County had opted to go dry. This left many unincorporated places like Bucoda effectively out of the bar business, despite having a few bars themselves. The Bucoda bar owners only option was incorporation, which (after a few starts and stops) happened in 1911. It was illegal for Charles James to find his fuel in Thurston County, but the city fathers of Bucoda provided.

In 1914, the prohibition and sale of alcohol was banned in Washington. Not the consumption though. In 1918, Washington went “Bone Dry,” which ended any loopholes left open in 1914.

And, in 1919, Prohibition started nationwide.

But, you could still find a drink in Olympia if you knew where and who
Liquor is mostly water, so it found a way.

What is now a fairly anonymous corner of Olympia, 8th and Chestnut, between Plum and the library, the back end of a handful of state office buildings, was known during prohibition as a “notorious liquor drive.”

And, of course, Olympia was the state capitol. And, the Hotel Olympian was were all the action was, across the street from the then state capitol. Built in 1918 for the expressed purpose of providing housing for state legislators while they were in town.

Rep. Maude Sweetman was the only woman in the legislature by the late 1920s, and lived in the Hotel Olympian. She provides a clear contrast of what remained of the dry coalition in those later prohibition years and the actual state of things in the hotel Olympian and otherwise.

Liquor laws were not, and in fact, could not be strongly enforced:

Anyone who lives at the Olympian Hotel through a legislative session must more than once be filled with anger and disgust and the nightly revelry a, the noises from which vibrate the hotel court…

…their drunken voices gave to the early morning air the confusion of their tongues, night after night through a whole session.

Let’s wind this up
By 1932, Washington was again ahead of the game when an initiative passed by 60 percent, repealing most of the dry laws.

In 1933, the United States matched pace with the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

And, in early 1934, former Olympia Mayor and state Senator E.N. Steele led the cause to write the rules that got Washington wet again. The Steele Act (which stayed intact until very recently) was defended from over 150 amendments on the floor of the Senate. In one of those rare moments when Olympia really did lead the state, George F. Yantis (another Olympia legislator) guided the Steele Act through the house as the speaker.

You can find a lot of explanations about why prohibition ended. It had become, in over a decade, too hard to prevent people from drinking. It was a joke, an openly mocked public policy against what people were going to do anyway. People with money found liquor and it was unfair for the rest of us not to enjoy.

And today, especially in Washington as we liberalize our other substance control laws, it seems quaint that we once outlawed something as innocent as a bottle of wine

Zoom back into Bucoda
Charles James in fact did not spend much time in jail. Found guilty in May, he was sentenced to three months in the county jail.

But only after a few weeks, Mrs. James reached out to the governor. In front of the governor himself, the prisoner of Thurston County (Charles James was literally the only prisoner in the jail at that moment) promised he wouldn’t drink anymore. He admitted alcohol got him into trouble and that he would become dry himself.

And, the governor let him go.

Just one more note: I really liked the idea of reading this outloud, so I may at some point, turn it into a podcast sort of thing.

July 6, 1889: the last Independence Day as a territory and Olympia is on show

July 6, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

As the last July with Washington at just a territory (statehood would come in November), the people of Olympia greeted the soon to be state’s constitution writers.

Reprinted in the Oregonian on July 6, 1889 (from the Olympian):

Let it be shown that the people of Olympia are on a par in social amenities with he acknowledged beauty of their city.

…The tide has come to Olympia and if now taken at its flood will surely lead on to fortune if not to tame.

In their daily contact with the members of this constitutional convention, the people of this city will be living epistles, “known and read of all men.” The conclusion, then, of the whole matter appears to be that Olympia has a rare opportunity of establishing and confirming its own fair name in the hearts and minds of the territory’s representative citizens.

This is an early and interesting notation as Olympia’s supplication to the rest of the state with its role as state capital. I feel like we still feel this way from time to time, trying to justify our existence to the rest of the state, as if Yakima or Tacoma could rank the capital from us at any point. This is probably how we get wrapped around the axle on the Deschutes Estuary.

I’d hope by now that we just accept that Olympia is good, from a dozen or so angles. Yes, we benefit from state jobs. But, we’re also a good town because of Evergreen (which probably wouldn’t be here without the state government).

Eh, forget it. I’m an epistle too I suppose.

You know what guys? All the good ideas fell through for today. So, here’s a story about a barber that I already wrote

June 4, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

This is one of my favorite all time stories I’ve written for Thurston Talk. Its politics and barbers.

Seriously, that was a thing once:

By the fall, Gov. Mead traveled to Spokane, hearing the wrath of Spokane barbers and their local backers. He promptly sent Collins a telegram asking him to resign.

From the Daily Olympian on October 5, 1907: “The governor’s telegram so implied and Mr. Collins, nor his friends know of any reason why his services as a member of the board have not been satisfactory. Mr. Collins is reported to be cogitating the matter and nursing his wrath, but while some of his friends have advised him to refuse to resign, he will probably comply with the governor’s request.”

Collins refused. From the Seattle Times, October 10, 1907: “The Olympian man sent back a message just as promptly and just as emphatically and declined absolutely to tender his resignation.”

For over a month Spokane barbers and politicians pushed on Mead until November 17, 1907 when he finally pushed Collins off the board. From the Seattle Times, November 17, 1907: “The governor and Collins have been having a regular battledoor and shuttlecock game for several weeks past.

When Gov. Mead returned to Olympia he took the matter up with Collins personally and urged him to file his resignation. Collins, acting on the advice of his friends and backers, particularly the labor unions of Olympia… still persisted in his refusal to resign. The governor assured him, he says, that the request made was not at all personal, but that political conditions made it necessary to give the three large cities of the state the membership of the board. The two men were entirely friendly in their numerous conferences.”

Read the entire thing here.

Riley, the first real public ass in Olympia

June 1, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

In honor of white supremacists being run out of downtown Olympia, I give you an excerpt from Oyster Light, my bookish collection of historical essays about Olympia. Here’s the part about James Riley, who may be the biggest ass who ever lived in Olympia. Much more so than Joseph Bunting, who wasn’t nice either. But, I’m far more ambivalent about Bunting than Riley. Every bad thing we say about Bunting should be said 100 times more about Riley.

Oyster Light is available here for free (or at a cost if that’s your sort of thing) or for $11 in printed form here.

Let’s go back to the Washington Territory and Jim Riley in the summer of 1861. As the rest of the country was lurching into the first summer of the Civil War, Riley was at a low point. Remember, Riley was the actor in the Too-a-pi-ti killing. He put the bullet in Too-a-pi-ti’s back and the pioneer community was learning really how savage Riley could be.

The white community, after years of Riley being “arraigned on charges of drunkenness, disorderly conduct, brutal assault, rape and petit and grand larceny” had had enough.

By August, with a warrant out and the sheriff looking for him, Riley “got everything in readiness for a trip to the mines, with no intention of never (sic) returning to the scene of his many brutal exploits.” The mines were where men like him went to disappear. They were for Riley, and they apparently were for Joseph Bunting a decade later, the place at the edges of society where men like them could still live.

 But, before Riley left, he wanted reciprocity. “(He) had determined to revenge himself upon as many as possible of those of our citizens who had in any manner been parties to his repeated arrests and trials.”

Before he was brought in by the sheriff, Riley got one man drunk and bashed his head in with a rock, who somehow survived. In another episode, Reily stabbed an Indian to death. His one last spree lasted as long as it took the sheriff to chase him out of his house and shoot him in his leg during the foot pursuit. The Steilacoom newspaper commented on the number of people disappointed in Sheriff Tucker for not just killing Riley.

Riley in 1861 is the direct result of our history five years before during the Puget Sound War. Removing Indians from downtown Olympia. The murder of Quiemuth and Too-a-pi-ti. These acts when unpunished and the social acceptance gave violent psychopaths like Riley the rope that finally ran out for him in 1861.

A month after being brought in by the Sheriff, Riley gave the South Sound the slip for the last time. He apparently was healed from his gunshot wound, but still used his crutches as a ruse (ever the actor) to put his captures at ease. Then, at a point when his watchers were distracted, he took off into the woods, never to be seen again.

Like Bunting after him, Riley was supposed to end up heading to the mines somewhere. There are also records of a Jim Riley committing murder in King County a few years later, but Riley is pretty much off the historic record after 1861.

As he left, the Steilacoom newspaper noted (again) that most of the local community just wouldn’t mind seeing Riley be killed. They would be “pledged and ready to hang him without ceremony…” because of “…the present absence of anything like law for men like Riley.”

But, not everyone wanted to see Riley hung. The paper ran an editorial over the summer, arguing against the “he only killed an Indian” defense of Riley. The newspaper’s response was not as emotional and full of righteous human rights indignation as you would hope. The writer’s main point was that Indians shouldn’t be killed because their families might kill back. They didn’t want to spark a new Puget Sound War.

But still, by the time Riley disappeared, the paper estimated only 10 percent of the community would save him from hanging. That’s a smaller number still, but well higher than I would assume a serial killer would warrant today.

Olympia needs a lot of things in regards to history and knowing itself

May 18, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

If I was invited to the historic meeting of historians, I think I would’ve had something to say.

And, this is it: we do need a lot of things in terms of communicating and preserving our history here. And, a museum would do a lot of things. But, I’m not sure it’s the biggest problem we have. Or, rather, the idea with the most potential.

There are at least two other things that I think should enter the discussion at the same level. 1) A new library in Olympia and 2) much more dedication and funds towards bringing public what historic resources are available.

Mostly my concern for a new library is sharpened by my experience on the Timberland Library board (which operates the current Olympia library as part of a five county system). Our library was out-dated as soon as it was built in the late 1970s. And, since then we’ve only had one serious try at replacing it.

I love the idea of museums, but there is no reason at all a museum (and archive for that matter) couldn’t be part of a new, larger Olympia library.

That said, buildings are buildings and knowledge is knowledge. If I had $1 million to spend on Olympia history today, my first stop would be expanding electronic resources available to people who write about history.

Most notably, I’d spend whatever I’d have to of that $1 million to cracking open the Olympian archives (and whatever other newspapers have been digitized) for public use. Most publicly available newspaper archives drop dead after 1922 (after which copyrights can be enforced). But, it is possible for libraries to open up newspaper archives to their patrons.

The Seattle Public Library was able to do this with the Seattle Times archive a few years back. And, at least to me, that one resource has been invaluable. Applying what are usually hard to access newspaper to word searchable archives in incredibly useful. The bias of an individual newspaper notwithstanding, a daily ticktock of the activities of a community, searchable via computer? Now, that would open history to a community.

Then build me a new library. Then build me a museum (if you couldn’t fold it into the library).

When was the last gray wolf shot in Thurston County?

May 7, 2015 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Wolves are on their way back in Western Washington.

At one point in our past, wolves roamed the place we now call home. Certainly Thurston County was on the edge of where these big dogs roamed, but obviously there were some that roamed down the Black Hills from the Olympics.

The last wolf pair was shot in the Olympics in 1938. That was the absolute end of wolfs in Washington until very recently.

But, as far as I can tell, wolfs came to an end in Thurston County maybe a few decades before. The last record I can find of a wolf being shot here was in 1909:

Joe Easterday came back home from a hunting trip that year, ranging from the Black Hills down to Oyster Bay. Among the dozens of animals he and his friends shot was a “timber wolf.” He pointed out that he likely would have stayed out longer, but the number of animals he had bagged was just too many to lug around.

Plus, Joe’s body had literally given out:

He says he would have been still in the woods if it was not for the fact that has shot so much that his arm is swollen and his fingers have increased to such a size that he can no longer pull the trigger. He visited a doctor to have his arm and hand attended to and while here will have his clothes padded so that his shoulder and side will not get black and blue in the future from the recoil of the weapon.

The expanding human footprint, plus “varmint hunts” and other likewise less than nice ways to say predator extermination programs, did the wolves in.

A notice for a varmint hunt in the 1911 Olympian listed the points given out by the Thurston County Association for the Protection and Propagation of Game and Game Fish. Two teams worked from May 1911 to February of the next year. The top hunter of either group would get $20, with lesser prizes for second and third. The losing team would throw a party for the winning side.

If you shot a cougar, your team would get 1,000 points. A wolf, 750 and likewise for a coyote. A fisher would get 500 points. And, last on the list of a dozen animals and their corresponding points, was the blue jay. That would get you 75 points for your team.

From the Morning Olympian, October 1909:

Just in case you’re wondering, I’m very pro-hunting. Very pro-killing animals for food. And, sport for that matter. Food is a higher moral calling though.

That said, I’m also pro-eating chocolate cake. But, no one should eat so much cake, or hunt so many animals, they literally have to go see a doctor about it.