Category: Olympia history (Page 6 of 9)

This is some sort of sports team, from the Washington State Historical Society:

But, I really doubt it is a basketball team, as labelled by the WSHS. Mostly because it labelled as being taken in 1885 and James Naismith didn’t create the game until six years later. I think its much more likely that what we have here is an actual soccer team.

For one thing, the year is pretty good for the spread of the game. The first nationwide soccer association launched in 1884, the first national cup in 1885 along with the first international friendly. While all three of these events occurred inside the New York/New Jersey area, soccer obviously existed while basketball did not.

You can find some trace evidence of soccer in Washington State in the same era. This 1891 newsclip from Yakima mentions soccer being played.

Now, here’s some funny history about the Olympia Collegiate Institute. At different times, appently both the Methodists and Lutherans ran the old OCI, but merged them with Tacoma-area schools at different times. The Methodists absorbed OCI into the University of Puget Sound in the 1880s. The Lutherans restarted OCI (Later the Pacific Lutheran Seminary), absorbing it into Pacific Luthern University in the 1910s.

While Tacoma couldn’t end up stealing the capital from Olympia, they did make away with two colleges.

Big surprise, right? Because remember these signs that tried to connect a brackish estuary with bugs that are prevalent in stagnant freshwater?

Anyway, if you head to the section of Percival Landing that crosses the access to the yacht club, you find this sign.

The middle panel confusingly refers to the period of time in Olympia of the “long wharf,” when Olympia business interests were trying to defeat the mudflats north of downtown to find access to deeper waters for shipping. Eventually, through a combination of building the port peninsula with fill and dredging a basin, those mudflats were defeated by the 1930s.

It is pretty spurious to connect this era of filling tidelands and building the long pier to building Capitol Lake in the late 1940s.

This is really a story of two parts of Olympia, the section facing north trying to find shipping routes and the part facing south, looking at the capitol. These are really two different discussions. It took until the mudflats north of downtown were defeated in the 1930s for the discussion to build Capitol Lake to really his its stride. The Port of Olympia had been created, a channel and basin had been dug, and downtown Olympia had been filled out to meet it.

Ironically, it was keeping shipping lanes open to Tumwater that slowed down Capitol Lake for a few years. Tumwater city fathers (including the Schmitds of the brewery) didn’t think it was a good idea to dam the Deschutes to stop boats from getting to their city. They were eventually won over, but trying to connect shipping concerns with the origins of Capitol Lake is wrong.


But, that isn’t to say that the idea of creating a freshwater lake out of part of Budd Inlet didn’t have a shipping connection at one point. Strangely enough, in the long tale of where Capitol Lake came from, there was once a freshwater lake solution to the port’s mudflat problem.

Back in 1903 (eight years before Wilder and White) W.R. Brown put together a small group to try to create a freshwater harbor in Olympia, along the lines of Lake Union in Seattle. Instead of damming the Deschutes estuary at 4th or 5th Avenue, they would go out to Priest Point and build a massive berm there from shore to shore.

Morning Olympian, January 10, 1903:

Like nearly all pre-Wilder and White damming the Deschutes ideas, they were actually to facilitate commerce. The Schmidts of Olympia Beer actually dreamed a plan near to what the yacht club sign describes in 1895. The beer family thought that by creating a lake, they could ensure steady boat traffic to their brewery. But, those plans faded and by the 1910s, Tumwater and the Schmidts were opposed to any sort of damming, up to the point of roadblocking a 1915 plan.

Anyway, that’s a lot of history to unpack. You can read most of the story here at the Deschutes Estuary history page.

The most hilarious part of the otherwise troubling piece about street culture downtown by Austin Jenkins was this passage:

On Washington’s Capitol campus in Olympia, sandstone buildings stand as
monuments to the rule of law. But just a few blocks away you can find a
street culture where young adults and teenagers live by their own
rules—sometimes with tragic consequences. 

I mean, for Pete’s sake! This is the state capital! While you’re within site of our capitol building, please remind yourself not to fall into criminality!

Jenkins eventually reminds us that “It isn’t just Olympia,” that many other Cascadian cities have the same problems. But, the implication from his lede is that somehow, because of our sandstone buildings, Olympia should have less crime.

As silly as that sounds, it is actually true. Or, at least true from the point of view of the people that originally designed the campus. It is practically impossible to utter a phrase in Olympia about the campus without being reminded of its city beautiful origins.

The city beautiful movement in architecture began in the 1890s as a reaction to the quick and messy growth of American cities during the industrial revolution. When the city beautiful movement came to Olympia in the 1910s, it was hardly a booming metropolis. It was still a fairly common timber town just being carved away from the forest. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Olympia would reach its industrial peak, and the campus was well settled by then.

The thinking behind the city beautiful movement was that it would not only literally reform cities themselves, but it would change citizens.

From an essay by architect Pierre De Angelis:

The Cities Beautiful movement exists as an insignificant footnote in the current discourse on urban planning. It stands as a relatively short lived movement which flourished in the 1890’s; a genuine attempt to reform the wretched conditions of inner city poverty. 

…

However the upper and middle classes continued to travel into the city, to attend to their businesses and participate in leisure activities. Whether out of genuine concern or simply fear for their own safety and the continued viability of their businesses, middle and upper class reformers attempted to relieve the malaise of the city and lower classes. They did so by embracing the concept of beauty as an “effective social control device”… Reformers had no interest in beauty for its own sake but in its ameliorative power which could inspire civic pride and moral rectitude amongst the impoverished and poverty stricken. It is on these principals that the cities beautiful movement was born and on which much of our contemporary thinking on urbanity finds its ancestry.

There are some interesting parallels here between this description and the city beautiful and the Olympia downtown discussion. “(S)imply a fear for their own safety and the continued viability of their businesses…” is attached to the present time with people scared too come downtown. “(I)nspire civic pride and moral rectitude amongst the impoverished and poverty stricken” attached to ending homelessness and getting people off the streets.

We’re still having the urban discussions now that we had at the dawn of the “architecture will convince the poor to be good people” ideas behind city beautiful. We’re obviously moved beyond the point that we think nice looking buildings will make people better citizen. What Jenkins did was a device to put his particular story in the place he was writing about.

So, if we do end up getting around the corner on how bad downtown really has gotten, it won’t be with building nice looking buildings.

Did the world end? Has our economy crashed? If you can read this, leave me a comment below to tell me how it all ended. I’m writing this on Tuesday night, so I’m not sure if we breached the debt limit and America’s credit crunch killed the world economic system.

Anyway, if it is alright, let’s take another look back at one of the earlier times we crashed into a failing world economy in 1933. I wrote about that last hunger march here, but that remembering was from a pro-marcher point of view.

Lora Weed’s retelling here speaks of “*(the marchers’) attackers used broom handles to beat the marchers into ending their march.” But, this telling by former Olympia mayor E.N. Steele (in his self-published memoir) tells of a more patient and then flabbergasted response to the marchers:

I shall never forget watching them come in. Police met them at the city limits and escorted them to the park. It seemed as though the end would never come. They came in every kind of a conveyance; cars old and new of every vintage, and trucks of all makes and kinds. Many had tents. Those who did not were able to provide in someway. They came in January so it was rather cold, but they soon had fires going.

These people were for the most part good citizens who needed food and comfort. Hunger makes men desperate. Part of them were farmers, but most of them were from Seattle, Tacoma, or other cities where industries had closed down, throwing them out of work. There was no social security in those days, but there are always radicals and at a time like this they stir things up and really make trouble. We did all we could to make them happy.

But, negotiations with the state legislature for some sort of economic relief were slow going and conditions at the park went downhill.

Sanitary conditions were especially bad. As mayor of the city it was up to me to get them out of town. I submitted the matter to the Director for the State Department of Health. He directed a letter to me, stating that they must move at once, in the interests of their own health as well as the entire city, should an epidemic break out. I wrote a letter fixing a date for their departure. It was sent out and served on the leaders. Copies were posted on the trees.

They sent word they would not leave. Some of the most radical made speeches trying to stir them to fight. Rumors were whispered around town indicating real trouble. I called a meeting of the businessmen and others. After advising them of the entire situation, I asked for volunteers to be sworn in as deputy police. Those present volunteered almost to a man. The new police were organized. None were to carry guns. Each of these hundred men were to assemble at 8:00 A.M., at the Chief’s office, each wearing a badge. Each of them was given a short club to be used only in emergency. By 8:30 each was at his assigned post. There was a string of men on each side of the road the trespassers were to follow. At that time the Chief of Police entered the Park. The men and women were standing around in groups but showed no signs of moving out.

They indicated that they were not leaving and tried to get the Chief into an argument. His only comment was that he had a hundred deputies and the State Police at his disposal and that unless they were on the way by nine o’clock he had instructions from higher up to place them all under arrest. Some grumbled but some began to pack, others followed and at the appointed time they were on their way.

I failed to tell you that after a meeting about midnight a State Police Officer came to me and said there might be trouble as several of the visitors had been hanging around all evening. He took me by the arm and we went down a back way that I did not know was in existence, to the garage which is in the basement where I had my car. He rode home with me and to my surprise I found a shadow police had been on guard for the protection of my family.

That was the only time in my life that I have had to be guarded by secret police.

It is striking the difference in tone and perspective between Weed and Steele. Obviously, both are coming at it from different perspectives. But, today, I keep on coming back to the “Lord of the Flies” story on KPLU this week.

It is interesting how perspective is skewing our conversations about the sitting ordinance, the lower barrier shelter and the current nature of downtown. Either the city is too accepting or the city is criminalizing the poor. We can look back into history and find strains of the same debate throughout our history.

Prenote: If you’re thinking about suicide, talk to someone right this minute. Call 1-800-273-8255 or visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

It had been six years since the Capitol building in Olympia, Washington had been completed. Walter Wilder was in his home in Suffern New York, less than a mile from the New Jersey border.

While much of his life’s work was within a day’s travel of where he was at that moment, his and his partner’s largest work was 3,000 miles away on the the other side of the country. Also there was Florence Tunnard.

Wilder would shoot himself two years after his partnership with Harry White dissolved, after his mental health had spiralled downward and after his wife refused to let him divorce her in favor of Ms. Tunnard.

I wonder how in the day Wilder took his life if his mind wandered back to Olympia. The day the architecture firm got world over 20 years earlier that they’d won a contest for a new state capitol campus that would become their largest project. To the years he spent seeing his drawings come to life on the hill above the town on the edge of Puget Sound. And to Florence, the stenographer working at the state Attorney General’s office that he had fallen for.

At least in my part of the world, Harry White and Walter Wilder are most well known for the capitol in Olympia. It is a set of sandstone structures that to the amateur seem to emulate the national capitol in the other Washington. To the only slightly more informed, they are representations of an architectural movement called “City Beautiful.”

The dozens of other projects Wilder and White completed in their lives — houses, office buildings and college buildings — dot the New York and New Jersey region. They were successful in their own small way as architects, working consistently until the depression took hold and Wilders’ sanity lost hold.

In the end, the capitol group envisioned by Wilder and White was never built. After the construction of the original three buildings — the Temple of Justice, the domed legislative building and the insurance building — the state capitol planners took a break. The legislative building stood in the center of the unfinished group until the the middle of the Great Depression.

The state capitol commission eventually turned its attention to the back of the campus. With ample public money coming from the federal government for public works projects, the commission hired Olympia architect Joseph Wohleb to finish off the Wilder and White campus.

Wohleb is surprisingly similar to Wilder and White. If not for ignoring any contests to design state capitol buildings in eastern cities, Wohleb had a shockingly parallel career to the New York pair. His work is spread almost exclusively throughout the Northwest and mainly in Olympia. But, when it came to competing the last buildings constructed in the 1911 proposal, the state went to their home grown architect.

Wohleb had moved to Olympia just as Wilder and White had finished their original plans. As he put his head down and went on designing over 150 buildings throughout the decades. Surely, he would also look over his shoulder to watch Wilder and White at work.

But, in 1935 with Wilder dead and White still working in the east, those last two buildings were his to design. While it was outside his normal style, the stayed true to the partner’s original, classical style.

After that, the campus would turn west. forgetting the final pieces Wilder and White drew. One last office buliding (a matching pair to the insurance building, which flanks the legislative building on the east) was never built. Also, the once temporary governor’s mansion, (a permanent mansion envisioned by Wilder and White was to overlook Puget Sound on a bluff), is still hidden too far south.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the campus would creep east across Capital Way, further changing the original Wilder and White orientation from a northern facing to east. An entire neighborhood would be lost underneath new campus buildings.

One house that was eventually removed from Capitol Way — mercifully moved in one piece a mile to the south — was the Egbert-Ingham house. This house was where Walter Wilder lived when he met Florence Tunnard, the love for whom he would eventually kill himself.

Eventually, his campus would expand beyond his vision to uproot the house to the south. The owner of the house in the 1970s put it up on wheels and put it down where it still is today.

The history of the Olympia oyster — as talismanic center of a Puget Sound home grown industry — is one of the most fascinating stories around here.

It is literally an industry and species wiped out because of industrial pollution which itself doesn’t exist because of laws and social concerns that didn’t come about until decades later.

For decades dozens of small companies picked and packed these little native oysters and shipped them across the world. People like E.N. Steele, who wrote the book on the Olympia, dedicated large parts of their lives to the industry and the oyster.

Steele:

The oyster growers feel that the decline has been caused by pulp mill waste from the mill at Shelton.
 …

In conclusion, I must say that The Olympia Oyster industry is very sick. In fact it is, at this writing, on its death bed, unless the knife that is stabbing at its heart can be removed. Those who love the Olympia Oyster, and who grew it still have hope. In nature there is always survival; no such thing as extermination of species by nature. But trade waste is man-produced poison. There must also be progress in industry. But man has been given intelligence to find ways and means to prevent the
trade waste from destroying the natural resources so that all may survive and live together.

But, because of pollution from another home grown industry (timber), the Olympia lost its place to the immigrant Pacific oyster. While oystermen were disturbed to see that pollution was taking away the Olympia, they coolly and calmly replaced it with the more hardy Pacific.

But, now, because of impacts of ocean acidification, the tables might be turning on the Pacific. The chemistry of the oceans are slowly changing because we pollute too much. And, because of the way Pacific oysters reproduce, they’re apparently at a disadvantage to the Olympias.

From the The World in Coos Bay:

“The short answer is that the native Olympia oysters may be doing OK
and recovering in Coos Bay despite ocean acidification,” he said.

Rumrill,
currently the director of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
shellfish monitoring program, was instrumental in Olympia oyster
recovery efforts at the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve
near Charleston.

“It may be that the shallow parts of Coos Bay may be able to act sort of as a buffer,” he said.
Oregon
State University Professor George Waldbusser said said difference in
survivability likely lies in the species’ reproductive practices.

“Olympias
are brooders,” he said, referring to the species’ trait of carrying
eggs in an internal chamber for several weeks after fertilization.

Pacific oysters, on the other hand, are broadcast spawners, meaning their eggs are fertilized and develop in open water.

Waldbusser
said the native species’ reproductive period is on the edge of the
coast’s seasonal upwelling cycle, when deep ocean currents force cold
water to the surface.

Upwelling is believed to contribute to the
acidification process by bringing oxygen-deprived, CO2-rich acidic water
to the ocean’s surface.

 We don’t dump timber production waste directly into Puget Sound the way we used to. We did it for long enough to put Olympias on their heals and the oyster world moved on to Pacific oysters.

Eventually our laws caught up to timber waste, but it was too late for Olympias. It would be supremely ironic that Olympias would stage a comeback on Pacific oysters because our laws couldn’t catch up with ocean acidification.

First on Samuel Thurston, which I wrote about here, but I’ll do it again.

Its pretty interesting, I took at look into this claim, that Samuel Thurston (the first territorial delegate from Oregon to Congress) lied in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to take revenge on English settlers that predated American claims. I read as much as I could, including Thurston’s own diary, and couldn’t come up with a single time he even went in front of the Supreme Court.

An old version of a Historylink article on Thurston repeated the claim:

Section 11 of the Land Claim Act was a vendetta against former Hudson’s
Bay agent Dr. John McLoughlin, and sought to deny him a land claim in
Oregon City.  Methodists wished to build a mission and settlements on
the same property and by the time Thurston arrived in Oregon, the
dispute was intense. Siding with the Methodists, Thurston falsely
testified to the United States Supreme Court, discrediting McLoughlin on
the basis of citizenship.

So, I emailed the author two years ago to see if she could point me towards a reference. It doesn’t look like she came up with anything, because the current article has no reference at all to a Supreme Court incident.

So, onto William Wallace (featured recently in the Suburban Times), the Lincoln era territorial governor and delegate of Washington. He’s a very interesting man, he defended Leschi and was also instrumental in Idaho being invented.

But, was he a Lincoln pall bearer? Maybe? Not at least in the sense of what you’d think of a pall bearer (here and here). It is possible that he at one point helped carry the Lincoln coffin as it was transported from Washington D.C. to Illinois. But, when you look at the list of pall bearers, the most prominent men who were recognized in the era for their duty, there’s no Wallace.

It is just a bit funny that one of Lincoln’s sons was named for a William Wallace, whose wife was named Frances, one of Mary Todd’s sisters. But, our Williams Wallace’s wife’s name was Lucena.

From George Vancouver’s journal in 1792:

Thus by our joint efforts, we had completely explored every turning of this extensive inlet; and to commemorate Mr. Puget’s exertions, the south extremity of it I named Puget’s Sound.

Because Olympia, or rather what today we consider the suburbs of Olympia was first in western Washington, we call the entire inland sea in our region “Puget Sound.”

Originally, at least at its naming, Puget Sound only stretched as far north as the Tacoma Narrows. At that point, the water bodies took on other names such as Admiralty Inlet. If the first non-Indian settlements might have been further north, we might be talking about Admiralty Inlet rather than Puget Sound.

It is likely that Vancouver himself thought the honor he gave to the British Admiralty more significant than naming a minor arm of the major water body after one of his officers.

But, the British Puget Sound Agricultural Company came about 40 years later and at Nisqually, settled on the shores of the contemporary and modern Puget Sound.

When the Americans came, all bets were off. The second newspaper in what would become the territorial capital blatantly advertised itself as being “on” Puget Sound.

So, as American communities began to stretch north away from Oregon and Olympia, they move the Puget Sound name north with them, erasing past distinctions.

From Edmond Meany’s footnotes to Vancouver’s Journal:

These settlements… were near the southern extremity of this inland sea — the very portion which Vancouver named Puget’s Sound. That name became the familiar one, ans as the white settlements moved northward along the shores that name carried along regardless of other names, like Admiralty Inlet, Port Gardner, the Gulf of Georgia and Strait of Juan De Fuca. Puget Sound became the generic name for the whole region and is largely so used in the present time.

Port Gardner was named for a British vice-admiral and Vancouver’s patron and the Gulf of Georgia was for King George III. Both seem to outrank Lt. Peter Puget, hardworker he may be.

It wasn’t until 1919 that the name Puget Sound for the entire body of water from the Pacific inland was officially named Puget Sound.

Update:

Well, based on a comment from Edward Echtle (@Tenalquot) earlier this morning, it turns out it is McLane Creek. Couldn’t be anywhere else. The reason is Courtney Love still owns a place out on Delphi Road that contains a significant portion of the creek.

And, from the history of the property on Redfin, the house has been for sale in the recent past. It was listed three times since 2010 and had a pending sale in 2012. But, that apparently never came through and the property was delisted again earlier this year.

Original Post:

A few weeks ago when I went down to our own little ghost town of Bordeaux, I remembered in the back of my head something about Kurt Cobain’s mom’s house being somewhere in the neighborhood. It turns out Wendy O’Connor (Cobain’s mom) lived just across the road from what remains of the old town site for years. In fact, she lived in the house of the town founder:

The Bordeaux House is one of the few extant buildings of the town of Bordeaux which was headquarters to the Mumby Shingle and Lumber Company, one of the most important lumbering operations in Thurston County. The firm opened up the harvesting of timber in the Black Hills while pioneering new methods of logging and manufacturing. After cutting and processing billions of board feet of lumber from 1902 to 1941, the operation closed and the town was abandoned. Only this house, home of Thomas Bordeaux, the firm’s founder, featuring fine uses of wood from the mill and two other structures and a safe from the former hotel remain from the town which has excellent integrity are a small mobile logger’s residence and a deteriorated school.

It also turns out that in the years following Cobain’s suicide, that the house was the site of his last memorial service:

One unique feature: The house is one of about a dozen of Cobain’s final resting places.

On Memorial Day 1999, O’Connor organized a ceremony during which
Cobain and Love’s then 6-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, tossed some of
his ashes into McLane Creek, which runs behind the house.

The ceremony was recounted in “Heavier Than Heaven,” a biography of Cobain written by Charles Cross.

The problem in that passage (and in the similar passage towards the end of Cross’s book) name a curious local stream for the receiving Cobain’s ashes. McLane Creek is a creek on the western edge of Thurston County, but it is miles from the house on Bordeaux Road. McLane and Mima (the creek closest to the Bordeaux hosue) creeks don’t connect and flow in opposite directions.

According to Thurston County records, the Bordeaux house was owned by Courtney Love for almost ten years.

There also isn’t a creek that runs behind the house at all. There are two intermittent streams that run near the house, but nothing that I’d call “near.” The only actual creek — Mima Creek — near the house is through some woods and across a road. Hardly an easy thing to include into a memorial service.

It is possible that the memorial service wasn’t in fact held at the Bordeaux house, but rather at a nearby house that fronted the actual McLane Creek. Or, the ash scattering during the ceremony didn’t happen. Or it did, the ceremony was a the Bordeaux house and they just hiked a bit.

In one symbolic way, it does matter whether his family scattered Cobain’s ashes in McLane or Mima Creek.

McLane Creek and Mima are parts of different watersheds and flow in different directions. Literally in geography and figuratively in time.

McLane Creek, according to Cross:

In many ways, this too was a fitting resting place. Kurt had found his true artistic muse in Olympia, and less than five miles away he sat in a shitty little apartment that smelled of rabbit pee and wrote songs all day. Those songs would outlive Kurt and even his darkest demons.

 McLane Creek also flows north into Puget Sound, where the water meets Olympia and later Seattle. This is towards the future of Kurt Cobain, his adult life and eventually his tragic death.

Mima Creek, on the other hand, flows south into the Black River and then west into the Chehalis. It leads backwards into Kurt Cobain’s life back to the Harbor and where he was born.

One creek flows towards artistic creation and death, the other backwards toward tortured youth and birth.