Posts Tagged ‘history’

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Comparative Cultures 101

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013
At Jorvik

At Jorvik

Yesterday, two totally unrelated events converged and seguéd in my mind into a grand and impossible fantasy.  First was the arrival (several weeks after it was sent) of a postcard from members of the Mystery Book Club who were on a visit to England.  Second was a visit to Middle Village/Station Camp at McGowan – a ‘field trip’ with the visiting Cuzzins.

A month or so ago, as the book club (in which I was a founding member and a founding drop-out) were preparing a long anticipated trip to the UK, they mentioned that York was on their itinerary and Nyel and I said (as you do to friends off on an enviable adventure), “Try to visit the Jorvik Center while you were there.

That’s over-simplifying, of course, because we couldn’t think of what the place was called – only that it was a Viking “experience” – sort of a historic Disney ride which was created back in the 1970s on the site of an archaeological dig.  We had visited there in the mid-1990s and had a clear memory of the place, if not its name.

The Jorvik center came about when a factory in downtown York was demolished and excavations to the site by the York Archaeological Trust revealed the well-preserved remains of the timber buildings of the Viking city of Jorvik.  In addition, workshops, fences, animal pens, privies, pits and well were discovered, along with durable materials and artifacts such as pottery, metalwork and bones – even wood, leather, textiles and plant remains.  All in all, over 40,000 objects were recovered dating from about 900 AD.

After recovery of the artifacts, the Trust excavated part of Jorvik on the site, and brought the Viking village ‘back to life’ with sights, sounds, smells (including those of pigsties, latrines and a pigsty) and moving figures through innovative interpretive methods.  All of it has lingered in my mind as a real-life Disneyland ride back through time.

At Middle Village-Station Camp

At Middle Village/Station Camp

No sooner had the postcard picturing one of the animated ‘workers’ at Jorvik arrived, than we took Cheryl and Virg to the newest of the National Parks’ Lewis and Clark sites along the river.  To compare the two experiences is hardly fair but I just couldn’t help it.  How wonderful it would be if ‘our’ Middle Village/Station Camp site could be interpreted by really ‘taking’ visitors on a trip back in time!

The missing ingredient to that fantasy, of course, is money – ten or twenty million dollars, or maybe more, judging by the reported investment the York National Trust made to recreate and interpret the Jorvik site.  Even so, our conclusion at the end of our visit to Middle Village/Station Camp was that the interpretive signage could have been much, much better.  At the very least, the information (even as limited and repetitive as it was) could have been better written and less biased.

Oh well…

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A Grand Night for Singing!

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

Last night was the kick-off for the Community Historian Project, a concept that a group of us have been working on for the better part of a year and a half.  And, if I do say so myself, it was hugely successful.

First of all, the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum hosted the event in grand style – champagne, appetizers, seating at small round tables (with lovely white tablecloths!), flowers – the whole nine yards.  Secondly, people came by the dozens – 85 in attendance someone said.  Cate Gable and Jim Sayce explained our “vision” and described the nuts and bolts of the program which will begin on January 9th.

Somewhere in the order of events, the Willapa Hills (my favorite part) entertained with their usual hand-clapping, foot-stomping enthusiasm.  But, of course, they did far more than ‘entertain.’  They were the shining example of what we want the Community Historian Project to accomplish.

For several years the members of the Willapa Hills have been collecting historical information about the Columbia Pacific region, writing songs about things that strike their fancy, and presenting that information through their performances.  In my opinion, folk music is a fabulous way to document and preserve our history for posterity.  Who doesn’t know about Tom Dooley or John Henry?  But when it’s about our own, local history… Wow!

Music, of course, is highly share-able, but there are so many other ways to preserve and disseminate our history.  Whatever one’s interest or ability or talent can be brought into play.  And not only history that has already happened – history that is in the making right now!

As Jim pointed out, like it or not, facebook is today’s ‘history textbook’ in the making – the photographs and information from every walk of life.  Think of what we’d know about George Washington’s time if we could check out the Facebook CD for 1789, the year he was first elected to the presidency!

Well… I digress.  All in all, it was a grand evening.  I looking forward to the applications that we hope will come flooding in.  So much history.  So many people’s talents.  So many possibilities…

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Making Up The News

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

What first caught my eye in the new Chinook Observer’s 2012 Visitor’s Guide was a long-ago picture of Jazz and Oysters and the accompanying text that said it would be held in Oysterville this August.  Obviously written by Aliens.  J&O has not been held in Oysterville since 2010, much to our distress.  Would that the information in the paper were true… but it’s not.

My attention thus arrested, I read the rest of the article with the enchanting-if-overused title:  “Historic and lovely Oysterville is a ‘Shangri-La’ on the bay.’  I was treated to an entirely new history of Oysterville.

According to the paper (and, we all know what happens to “facts” once they are in print), Oysterville was first settled thirteen years earlier than all the first-hand accounts and history books have told us for the past 158 years.  Plus, according to this confused account, it was settled not by Espy and Clark but by John Douglas..  And by 1854 (when Espy and Clark built the first house in the area according to their own accounts), there was already a settlement of several hundred people here.  And by 1854, says the article, there were 800 people here. WOW!

Where does this stuff come from, anyway?  I’m being literal here.  Where does this information come from???  I called the editor to find out exactly that.  I had to leave a message and, admittedly, I was irate to the point of incoherence – probably said things about responsibility and ethics in journalism and what were they thinking.  Mostly, I wanted to know the source of this new history.  My call has yet to be returned.

Perhaps my ‘favorite’ part of the article (is it possible to have a favorite part of something that you really hate?) is this paragraph:

Old for a West Coast town, Oysterville is brand new in geographic terms.  Oysterville could be the only place in the United States that has always had human occupants. Native American people probably settled Oysterville as soon as it was created.  Chinook peoples came to the area that is Oysterville at seasonal intervals for untold centuries to harvest its bountiful oyster beds.

I’ve read and re-read these words and still cannot understand what they mean.  Who were those earliest human occupants?  Apparently not the Chinooks who “settled Oysterville as soon as it was created.”  Huh?

Meanwhile… a dedicated group of local historians have been working for more than a year to develop a Community History Program.  Its purpose will be to explore Pacific County history through field trips, visits with experts and opportunities to explore various history archives.  The goal is to provide certification to those interested in perpetuating our local history.

I do hope that whoever wrote that “Shangri-La” article takes the course – for the part on verifying sources and the ethics of documentation, if nothing else.  And, just in case there is still a question …for the second year in a row, J&O will  again be at Wilson’s Field in Ocean Park.  I checked.

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Posted in From the Past, Rants and Raves, The Writing Process | 2 Comments »

The Cedar Creek Grist Mill

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

It used to be that in the summer, presumably when time and weather were on our side, we would plan a few day trips to see those places that are nearby but that we never detour from our usual ruts to visit.  In the last few years, that concept has gotten away from us but then, last fall, I saw a piece on “Back Roads of Washington” about the Cedar Creek Grist Mill near Woodland.  I was intrigued, wrote the information on a sticky note and put it on the refrigerator.

Yesterday we packed a picnic lunch and went on a ‘field trip.’  Woodland is about two and a half hours and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit from Oysterville.  We dressed for warm weather (never mind that we still haven’t solved our car’s A/C problem) and headed out, arriving in plenty of time to eat our lunch before the Grist Mill opened at one o’clock.  There were picnic tables overlooking the creek and we sat in the shade of the cedars eating our pasta salad.  Chloe, the ancient resident retriever, sat and visited hopefully.

The Cedar Creek Grist Mill is a National Historic Landmark and offers free “working tours.”  Yesterday was all about producing flour and corn meal.  Gregg, in an elfish red hat, told us about the history of this mill – once run by a water wheel but then, in the 1880s converted to a water-run turbine.  He explained the difference between a grinding operation (in which the stones touch one another) and a grist operation (in which they don’t) and then turned the tour over to the miller and his apprentice.

After demonstrating the process for producing various grades of corn and wheat,  they gave away (donations gladly accepted) generous samples and Nyel happily scored a bag of cornmeal and two bags of whole wheat bread flour that the miller had ground at Nyel’s specific request!  A woman standing near us said that she’s baked bread using that flour before and it is undoubtedly the best bread she’s ever baked.  Yum!  I can’t wait!

Besides the demonstrations like we saw every Saturday and Sunday, the mill offers special events once a month.  Coming up are ”Cornmeal and Bluegrass Day” featuring fiddle music on August 25th and “Bread and Butter Day” when kids get to churn butter to accompany made-on-the-spot fry bread on September 29th.

Usually the last Saturday of October is apple pressing day but, according to their website, it won’t be happening this year.  I already have a sticky note on the refrigerator for 2013!

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Thoughts on a Spring Hat Day

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Backlit in My Spring Hat

     Yesterday morning, a blintz and coffee at the Full Circle Cafe with my writer friend Ruth.  At noon, a burger at the Shelburne Pub with Steve and Denise of the Pacific County Historical Society. We talked about writing projects and the vagaries of history — my idea of the perfect way to while away the time.  The sun was shining.  I wore my new spring hat and life was good.
     At the bottom of the pub menu, I noticed that it says The Shelburne Inn is the oldest operating hotel and inn in Washington State… and I pointed that out to the table-at-large.  We thought about it…
     “What about Dayton?  Or LaConner?  Don’t they have old hotels?”
     “Or what about the Tokeland Hotel?  It’s pretty old.”
     “Maybe,” I said, “it’s one of those ‘oldest continuously operating’ deals.  Like the Oysterville Post Office is the oldest continuously operating post office under the same name in the State.  Those qualifiers make all the difference.”
     “But I think it was closed in the fifties,” someone said.
     My curiosity was peaked.  The possibility of recidivist history is always challenging.   So later in the day I looked up the Shelburne’s website and found that the hotel has operated continuously since 1896.   There it was!  That word ‘continuously!’
     On the other hand, the Tokeland Hotel’s website says In 1889 the Kindreds expanded their farmhouse and opened the Kindred Inn.  Okay.  Earlier date.  But no ‘continuously’ and the name was different in the beginning.
     So… what’s the truth?  And, at the end of the day, it probably doesn’t much matter to anyone but me.  As long as the food is good and beds comfortable, feeling that they are staying at the “oldest” may give some satisfaction to visitors.  Now if only they could say Washington slept here…  Or maybe Lewis and Clark…

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1, 2, 3… 500!

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Pacific House circa 1890

     My friend, the late Larry Weathers, and I used to argue about how many people lived in Oysterville in its ‘hey-day.’  DeWitt Stoner, an old, old man in my childhood, had come here in 1884 when he was eleven years old.  He always claimed there were about 500 people living here then.
     “The census numbers just don’t bear that out,” Larry would say.  “Besides, every ghost town or place-that-is-no-more claims that they had a population of ‘about 500.’  It simply wasn’t true.”
     Though I loved arguing with him, I think Larry was right.  Even Pacific City at Cape Disappointment – a community that had barely begun when it was gobbled up by a federal executive order creating Fort Canby Military Reservation – was said to have had as many as 500 people.  I have to concede that those numbers are highly unlikely for a town that lasted just a year or two and reportedly had only a store, tavern, sawmill, hotel and several houses.
     My counter-argument to Larry was always that Oysterville could have had a population of 500 when court was in session during the years that we served as the County Seat.  That was when the lawyers and their clients came to town, filled the boarding houses and hotels – up to 250 people at the Pacific House alone!  Or so they say.
     Right now, I’m working with the census reports for the early decades of the twentieth century.  Those were the days after the County Seat had moved to South Bend, the train only came as far north as Nahcotta, and there wasn’t much going on in the oyster business.  Oysterville’s permanent population was dwindling seriously and it was beginning to be referred to in the Seattle newspapers as a “pioneer ghost town.”
     Even so, there were 82 residents living in 28 houses in Oysterville in 1920.  Of those, 28 were school-aged children – fewer, presumably, than the 1914-1918 years when a second school was opened in town to accommodate the very large student population.  At the conclusion of the 1920 report it is noted that there were 27 vacant residences in town.
     I wonder if our latest census report will reflect the number of ‘vacant’ houses in town – or at least the ones that were vacant when the census taker was making her rounds.  These days, most of those are second homes.  Will that be noted?
     And, what will someone like me make of our current census data 100 years from now?   Actually, only 70 years from now.  According to the National Archives and Records Administration, a complete report cannot be released for 72 years following the census.  I’m sorry I won’t be around in 2082 to learn what was reported for Oysterville!

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“The Green Thing”

Friday, January 6th, 2012
Back in the Day

       I woke up wondering what my blog would be this morning and found that one of those email jokes had arrived from my cousin Nick.  For whatever reason, I read it before blipping and really liked it – maybe not the tone, but the information.  So, I’m following his directions to “forward it.”
      At the checkout counter the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
     The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”
The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
       She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing back then.
    Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
     We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady was right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
     Back then, we had one TV or radio in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
     Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.
     But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
     Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart alek young person.
     Remember: Don’t make old people mad.  We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to tick us off.
     I don’t know who the original author of this was… but, thank you!

 

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Christmas Fever in Oysterville

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Ilwaco as seen from Yellow Bluff, 1915

     Between coughing fits and feverish sleep, I’ve been re-reading Charlotte and Edgar Davis’s They Remembered series.  The books probably wouldn’t qualify for any great literary awards, but they are a fabulous documentation of the early families here on the beach.
     I am particularly interested in the accounts of the early Finns in Ilwaco.  Presented as oral histories, the stories tell of the ancestors of many people I know in the community and of many of the school kids I taught at Hilltop and Long Beach Schools.  They are names familiar to all of us who live here – Saari and Harju, Leback and Koski, Kary and Kaino and on and on.  In Volume II, there is “a partial list of names of heads of Finnish families in Ilwaco” as well as Wayne Koski could remember on March 9, 1982.  Eighty-seven names!  Eighty-seven households!
     Every reminiscence tells of the hard work these families had, first of all, in getting here, and secondly, in establishing themselves in a pioneer outpost so far from their native land.  Most arrived in the 1870s and the stories were told more than a hundred years later by the next generation, or the next.  They tell of their parents’ and grandparents’ struggles and of their own childhoods, working with their parents building fishtraps, building boats, building their houses, knitting nets, going to school and on to college, and always of working, working, working alongside their families and neighbors.
     In between my reading and sleeping bouts, I try to catch up with my email.  One of my far-away friends wrote that she was having difficulty delivering a Christmas gift of toys to an immigrant family.  The school had put them on the “needy list” but the family had taken themselves off.  What to do???  In my feverish reverie I realized that not a single one of the Finnish remembrances I’d been reading included the words “play” or “games” or “toys.”  What a different time and place we’ve come to.

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Posted in Books and Reading, Community Spirit, From the Past, Kids | 2 Comments »

Storytelling

Friday, July 29th, 2011
Learning How

     When I was a kid in school, history was not on my list of favorite subjects – not by a long shot.  In fact, until recently when I began seeing references to myself as a “historian,” the thought of ‘history’ (as in dates and places and battle names) had no appeal at all.  Still doesn’t.
     It’s the stories that interest me – the quirky, the humorous, the poignant stories about people.  It must have begun on those chilly evenings around the library fireplace here in Oysterville when the grown-ups would gather and reminisce. 
     I loved being “the mouse in the corner” listening quietly.  I’m sure there was much I didn’t understand but, in those days when children were still to be “seen and not heard,” it would never have occurred to me to ask.
     Now, I ask.  Not only that, but I often write about those stories and lo and behold I’m called a historian.  I’m sure “real” historians – you know, those with lots of degrees and initials after their names – are laughing up their sleeves.
     What brought all this to mind just now is a story about Bert Andrews that I may use in one of the Jail Book articles I’m writing for the paper.  (Not that Bert ever had anything to do with jail, I hasten to point out!) Bert lived here in Oysterville – some of his descendents do, still – and, according to my family, he was a “mechanical genius.”
     Bert provided Oysterville with many “firsts” including, years before Roosevelt’s “rural electrification program” arrived, electricity supplied by a Delco electrical system he rigged up in his barn.  The power was enough to supply a single light bulb or two to most houses in town but it was “lights out” each night at ten o’clock when Bert and his wife, Minnie, went to bed. 
     Bert’s first car, a 1911 Winton, arrived in Oysterville by barge from Raymond.  To learn how it operated, he took it completely apart and then rebuilt it, piece by piece.  He quickly became the recognized authority on automobile mechanisms and, as more cars began to arrive on the peninsula, Bert was the person car owners turned to when they had difficulties.
     I remember Bert well and I remember lots of ‘Bert stories.’  Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that re-telling those stories (and lots more like them) would make me a “historian” in the eyes of others!  As I often say, “Go figure!”

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Posted in From the Past, The Writing Process | 2 Comments »

My Five Choices

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Five Favorites

     I always enjoy reading “Take 5” which occasionally runs on the inside cover of Coast Magazine.  A few months back it was Editor Kathleen Strecker’s Five All-Time Favorite TV Shows.  This week it was Cate Gable’s Five Top Magazine Picks.  Whatever the topic, it makes me examine what my own top five might be.  And, if I were to choose a topic, what would that be?   Recently, when someone asked me to recommend a history of the area, I flashed on “Take 5” and thought, “That’s it!  That’s what my top five choices would be!”  Since I’m not likely to get that opportunity, I’ve decided to write them here:

  1. The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 6, November 2, 1805-March 22, 1806 edited by Gary E. Moulton.  This volume deals with the time period of the expedition’s journey from the Cascades of the Columbia through their winter at Fort Clatsop – the part of the journey most germane to us.  Moulton’s edition not only presents the full text of the journals, but is well annotated giving added insight and understanding to the original works.
  2. The Northwest Coast or Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory by James G. Swan.  This remarkable volume is a first-hand account of the author’s 1852-1855 stay on Shoalwater (now Willapa) Bay when only a few dozen white setters lived among the Indians in the midst of a yet untamed wilderness.  His observations of the area and of its indigenous peoples provide the perfect yardstick against which we can measure our ‘progress’ of the last hundred and fifty years.
  3. Coast Country: A History of Southwest Washington by Lucile McDonald. Written in a straightforward, almost chatty style, this book gives a behind-the-scenes look at the peninsula of the mid-twentieth century and of its history as seen through the eyes of local residents from whom the author drew much of her material.  Sometimes the facts are a little skewed, but McDonald’s enthusiasm makes for delightful reading and the photographs will remind many readers of barely remembered peninsula landmarks.
  4. Oysterville: Road’s to Grandpa’s Village by Willard R. Espy.  Published shortly after Alex Haley’s 1976 blockbuster, Espy’s book has been hailed “the white man’s Roots.”  It is the culmination of his thirty years research into the Espy and Richardson family genealogies, but it is the author’s beautifully interweaving of anecdotes and stories about the early Shoalwater Bay region that make it a must for anyone interested in the history of our area.
  5. The Nickel Plated Beauty by Patricia Beatty.  Set in Ocean Park, Washington Territory in 1886, this is the story of the seven Kimball youngsters and their struggles to earn (secretly) $27 for a new stove for their mother.  This is children’s historical fiction at its best.  I read it to my classes each of the 23 years I taught in the Ocean Beach School District.  I still feel it’s a must for anyone growing up here at the beach.  Or for anyone else!

P.S. There are two other books, each with a specific focus that also should be on the list for anyone seriously interested in our history:  The Railroad That Ran by the Tide by Raymond J. Feagans and Pacific Graveyard by James A. Gibbs.

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