David Kimball Hansen
On Saturday we attended a lecture by David Kimball Hansen, historian and former curator of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. He was at the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum to talk about his grandmother and her paintings currently on exhibit there.
Hansen comes from an amazing family. Their roots go back to revolutionary times in Massachusetts and to pioneer times in Cathlamet, Washington. His mother, Julia Butler Hansen served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1960-1974. She represented Washington’s Third Congressional District as a Democrat and was the second woman and first Democratic woman elected to Congress from our state.
Maude Kimball Butler, David Hansen’s grandmother and Julia Hansen’s mother, was an early schoolteacher in Cathlamet and was a prolific painter, as well. More than 200 of her watercolors are on display at the family home – now the Julia Butler Hansen Heritage Center in Cathlamet.
The 75 works on display in Ilwaco are mostly scenes that Butler painted from memory after she was 70 years old. They are of life along the river near Cathlamet and Skamokawa as it was during her childhood and before. It was about those paintings that her grandson spoke.
As he talked about the early days pictured in the paintings, I was struck by the similarities between Cathlamet and Oysterville. They had their beginnings about the same time (Cathlamet in 1848, six years earlier than Oysterville) and both were accessible only by water. Cathlamet was oriented facing the Columbia River; Oysterville’s buildings faced Shoalwater Bay.
It was while Hansen was talking about that water orientation that I had an “Aha!” moment. Someone asked him where the main street of town was.
“There was no main street,” he said, “because there were no roads to anywhere. The connection to ‘outside’ was by water.”
During all these years that I’ve been talking and writing about the ghost streets of Oysterville – the short streets within the village that have long since disappeared – I’ve wondered where “downtown” was and what the focus of pedestrian and equine traffic was. Even though another compartment of my mind knew that everything faced the bay, I never had put all of that together.
And suddenly, hearing David Hansen’s words, the penny dropped: There was no need for a main street in Oysterville either. The only necessary streets were those within the town but, but until there were other settlements on the peninsula and roads began to be built, there was no need for a thoroughfare through the village. And so there wasn’t one.
“Aha!” and also, “Duh!”
I am so sorry that I had to miss David’s talk but I am so glad that you were there.