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Diablo Dam incline railway climbing Sourdough Mountain, 1930. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, 2306.
Children waving to ferry, 1950. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry.
Loggers in the Northwest woods. Courtesy Washington State Digital Archives.
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3/27/2025
Taken from Their Homes
On March 30, 1942, one month after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 directing the incarceration of all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast, Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island became the first in the country to be removed, most likely because of the proximity of the Bremerton Navy Yard and other military installations.
Their ties to the island community were strong. Neighbors offered to care for their farms and protect their homes while they were gone. Some onlookers wept as evacuees sailed away from Eagle Harbor aboard a ferry. At the time, Bainbridge Review co-publishers Walt Woodward and Milly Woodward editorialized against the forced removal, and when the war ended they helped pave the way for the many of the island's displaced residents to return from the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California.
The uprooting of Japanese Americans affected many communities throughout the state, from King County, to the San Juan Islands, to the Yakima Valley, to Spokane, yet the reactions of residents in those areas often stood in sharp contrast to the compassion and concern shown by Bainbridge Islanders for their Japanese American friends. Since 1996, many of the internees' oral histories have been chronicled by the Densho Project, which has been documenting and archiving the histories of all Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
Ralph Munro (1943-2025)
It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to our good friend Ralph Munro, who died this week at the age of 81. Ralph was Washington’s longest-serving secretary of state and championed such causes as disability rights, immigration, environmental issues, orca protection, polio eradication, and so much more. He was also a tireless advocate for making voting more accessible, and was integral to instituting Washington's vote-by-mail system, which many other states have since adopted.
Ralph had a passion for history and historic preservation, and he was very supportive of our work here at HistoryLink. When this site first began, he would stop by our office occasionally to chat with Walt Crowley, and Ralph was always interested in our plans to continually build and improve this encyclopedia of Washington state history. He even contributed two articles for the site: his 2004 eulogy of Lud Kramer – the youngest Secretary of State in Washington state history – and this delightful piece about an April Fool's prank that was carried out inside the Capitol Building.
April 1 marks two important anniversaries in the early history of Tacoma. The first occurred on April 1, 1852, when Nicolas Delin began constructing a sawmill at the head of Commencement Bay. And on April 1, 1868, developer Morton Matthew McCarver arrived to purchase land for a new townsite, which he called Tacoma City. Within five years he had helped convince the Northern Pacific Railroad to choose Commencement Bay as its western terminus.
On March 31, 1889, Seattle's first electric streetcar took to the streets and was an immediate success. Seattle officially took over operation of the city's streetcar lines on April 1, 1919, but the date of the deed should have given somebody pause. It soon turned out that Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson had paid a grossly inflated price of $15 million and accepted disastrous terms to acquire the private system from the giant utility cartel Stone & Webster, which had gobbled up all local streetcar lines by 1900.
A century ago, marriages between men and women of different races were banned by many states, including California, where Gunjiro Aoki and Gladys Emery fell in love. The press tracked their elopement to Seattle, where they tied the knot on March 27, 1909, at Trinity Parish Church.
On March 29, 1925, a memorial to President Warren G. Harding was dedicated in Seattle's Woodland Park. Sculptural elements of the memorial were created by Alice Robertson Carr, but by the 1970s the monument had fallen into disrepair. The concrete bandstand and its bas-relief sculptures were broken up and used for fill beneath the zoo's new African Savannah exhibit.
On March 27, 2016, the Washington Huskies became the first team in state history to reach the NCAA women's basketball Final Four. On April 1, 2017, the Gonzaga men's team played in their first Final Four game, before being edged out by North Carolina in the championship game two days later. And just last year, on March 28, 2022, Pickleball was named Washington's official state sport.
Communities celebrating birthdays this week include: Quincy, which incorporated on March 27, 1907; Coupeville, whose voters approved city incorporation On April 2, 1910; the neighboring cities of Bellevue and Clyde Hill, which both incorporated on March 31, 1953; and Spokane Valley, which incorporated on March 31, 2003, and instantly became the state's ninth largest city.
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The first Starbucks opened for business at Seattle's Pike Place Market on March 31, 1971.
"And I think—when people ask what my memory was about evacuation—I think I’ll always remember the sound of the gate clanging behind you and knowing that you were finally under, you had barbed wires around you, and you were really being interned."
--Kara Kondo
