It was a strange road that led Enoch Bagshaw, the legendary Husky football coach, to Olympia in 1930. But, it was specifically and literally a road.

Bagshaw had been a young public works man in Snohomish County before his life’s vocation found him taking up the position as Everett High School’s gridiron football coach. His success at Everett led him to succeed the four coaches in four years that had attempted to replace UW’s first great coach, Gil Dobie.

Welsh born Bagshaw was not friendly. He won games, and led the high powered Husky offense to two Rose Bowls (tying one, losing the other).

Washington as a state was flying high through the 20s. And, if Bagshaw was the symbol of Washington’s sporting accent throughout the decade, Gov. Roland Hartley was the political embodiment. Laissez-faire to Hartley would be putting it mildly. Hartley wanted to cut down government to a size in which it would not interfere with timber men like himself, or any other capitalist.

And, like Baghaw’s Huskies, Hartley played rough and tumble, ignoring the polite insider politics that often made things happen in the state.

Hartley would also turn out to be Bagshaw’s last benefactor. Both men hailed from Everett (though both were born elsewhere). After Bagshaw finally left the Huskies, Hartley brought him down to Olympia to serve as a transportation administrator.

The Enoch Bagshaw that moved from Seattle to Olympia in the spring of 1930 was not a well man. The 1920s had been hard on his body. He probably didn’t know it, but his road was a short one.

As Seattle progressed towards the Great Depression in the summer and fall of 1930, there was a lot of doubt that Cascadia couldn’t keep on growing as it had in the 1920s.

Seattle Times in July:

“Seattle looks very good, said Mr. Oakes. “Your shops and stores and your industrial activity indicates that your people are not paying much attention to the toalk of business depression that is so much the topic of conversation in other centers at this time. You seem to go serenely on your way…”

And, in in November:

As in all depressions, much of this depression is psychological. People in Seattle are unduly depressed because they hear exaggerated rumors that people elsewhere are depressed. What people really ened is to know the facts. When these facts sink in, our people will realize that things are, as Mr. Coue said, “getting better and better” — and then, they, too, will feel better and better.

 By 1931 only 62 percent of those employed in Washington two years before still had jobs. Timber exports in 1933 were half of what they were in 1929.

Neither Bagshaw nor Washington may not have realized its heart was ready to go out.

It is ironic that the building in which Bagshaw died (today where the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction is located), then called the “Old Capitol Building” was also a symbol of our own economic over exuberance here in Thurston County.

Its its first life, the Chuckanut stone building was the Thurston County Courthouse. Built in the high flying days following statehood, Thurston County soon ran out of money, and sold it to the state, which was looking for decent quarters.

And, a final note, Hartley, who lost in 1932 to Clarence Martin, was fond of tearing down portions of state government. 1932 would be a highwater year for Democrats in Washington State. Both Hartley and the U.S. Senate seat would be turned over to Democrats that year. To give you a good sense of the how much 1932 change politics in Washington State, there were 41 Republicans in the legislature to one Democrat. In 1933 there were 21 Republicans and 25 Democrats. A couple of years later there were 41 Democrats and five Republicans (the total number of seats had gone up).

Last, what is one of the agencies that Hartley went after in his high tide days in the mid 1920s? OSPI.

Sometimes I think about what it means to Olympia to be a Capitol City. I’m not sure how many times in history it has happened, but I’m sure at least once a city has lost that status. Throughout the early history of Olympia, that tension, the possibility that Walla Walla or Yakima or Tacoma might snatch the seat of government seems to be overpowering.

It has been decades since anyone has thought about moving the capitol or even a good amount of state employees out of northern Thurston County. But, we still make civic decisions based on our status as the seat of government. The debates about issues like restoring Budd Inlet or downtown development are influenced by the gravitational pull of the state government.

If I haven’t changed the header of this  blog by the time you read this post, you’ll see the graphic is a detail of a Sanborn map of Olympia. You’ll notice a gulch that no longer exists running through what is now the capitol campus.

Here’s another map from 1919 that show it in much better detail (via Washington State Digital Archives):

The history of this gulch has always fascinated me. I’ve always wondered where it went, who decided to fill it in. It seems pretty straight forward given the context of history. In the early 1920s the campus was being developed. The gulch was in impediment to that development, so it was filled in.

But, I could never find a record of when or how it was filled.

Recently I learned the gulch had a bit more interesting of a history than just a former ditch in the way of a beautiful campus. As state leaders were gathering ideas for the layout of the modern campus in 1911, they decided a stadium would be built inside the gulch

The Olympian, April 1911:

The Stadium Bowl had just been finished in Tacoma inside a similar Puget Sound gulch, and local leaders imagined the Olympia Bowl as a smaller version.

But, as the capitol plans were slowly rolled out over the years, no stadium was ever included.

The proposed stadium was almost totally forgotten until local leaders tried to bring it back up in 1921. They not only wanted a stadium, but to save what was left of the gulch itself, which had been used as the trash bin for the capitol builders.

The Olympian, September 1921:

But, obviously the gully was filled and the stadium was never built. In 1922 30,000 yards of dirt were hauled to the gulch by the contractor who was grading the campus, finishing off the gulch for good.

Now, obviously the gulch still haunts us. All that fill is slowly working its way downhill, to the point that the beautiful greenhouse that sites right on the crest of the fill closed six years ago.

Filling the gulch to create a even lawn running up to the campus and not building a stadium is the type of choice that capitol cities make. Olympia did need a stadium. The old Athletic Park  wasn’t much. And, even Stevens Field (new in the early 1920s), when compared to a possible Stadium Bowl on Budd Inlet, doesn’t exactly shine in comparison.

A nice clean campus is good for state government, it just looks nice.

A utilitarian and centrally located stadium would’ve been good for Olympia. These are the things we give up when we decide to fight to be state capitol.