Topic: People's Histories
Walter Alvadore Bull was one of the first settlers of the Kittitas Valley in Central Washington. In 1869, he arrived in the region and joined about a dozen other families and unmarried men who had alr...
Wine grapes were one of the first cultivated fruits grown in the Pacific Northwest. Now wines made from Washington-grown grapes are among the best in the world. There are more than 750 wineries in Was...
The Elevated Transportation Company (ETC) was created by Initiative 41 on November 4, 1997. In that initiative, a 53 percent majority of Seattle voters called for construction of a 40-mile elevated sy...
This essay is the complete text of an autobiographical essay by Seattle pioneer Eli Mapel (or Maple) (1831-1911), the son of Jacob Mapel (or Maple) (1798-1884). Eli arrived in Seattle on October 12, 1...
Among the forgotten coal mining towns of King County, perhaps none is more forgotten than Elk Coal near the flank of Sugarloaf Mountain. The town, in an area rich with coal mines, was situated one-hal...
Elmer S. Yates (b. 1917) was raised in the Rainier Valley and attended Franklin High School. He went to sea and became a ship's captain. In 1996, he wrote to the Rainier Valley Historical Society from...
Elmer Yates (b. 1917) was raised in the Rainier Valley and attended Franklin High School. He went to sea and became a ship's captain. In 1996, he wrote to the Rainier Valley Historical Society from hi...
Elmer Yates (b. 1917) was raised in the Rainier Valley and graduated from Franklin High School in 1934. He went to sea and became a ship's captain. In about 1996, he wrote to the Rainier Valley Histor...
A lawyer by trade, Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was a civic activist who helped transform Seattle into one of America's great cities. One of his contemporaries was Emmett Watson (1918-2001), a Seattle newspa...
Often referred to as the patriarch of Snohomish, Emory C. Ferguson (1833-1911) was a pioneer who followed the same routes as many early adventurers who came West in the late 1850s. He first searched f...
In his more than three decades as the head gardener at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, Carl S. English Jr. created and nurtured the gardens that now bear his name. Sar...
This reminiscence of Enumclaw High School was written by Jim Merritt (1920-2000). Merritt grew up in Enumclaw, which is located in southeast King County. He was the son of Frank and Emily (Morris) Mer...
This reminiscence of Enumclaw in the 1920s and 1930s was written by James Edward Merritt (1920-2000). Jim Merritt was born on October 7, 1920, in South Prairie, Washington, the sixth child born to Fra...
The Enumclaw National Bank building at 1602 Cole Street in downtown Enumclaw was designated a landmark by King County in 2016. Built in 1923, the stately building housed a cobbler, as well as professi...
This People's History reproduces a June 1, 1914 article from The Ranch, a south King County magazine, describing some of the emerging cooperatively-owned businesses in the Enumclaw area. At the time, ...
The following article, a short account of Enumclaw, King County, was written by Dr. J. J. Smith, a resident of the town, and was originally published in the June 1909 edition of The Coast magazine, an...
In this People's History, avid baseball fan Eric Flom gives a play by play account of the thrilling All-Star game played on July 17, 1979 at the Kingdome. He was 11 at the time.
This eulogy for Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was given by fomer Washington Governor Gary Locke (b. 1950) on December 8, 2019 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Ellis was a giant in the cre...
This eulogy for A. Ludlow "Lud" Kramer (1932-2004) was given by Ralph Munro at Lud Kramer's memorial service at St. John's Cathedral in Spokane on April 16, 2004. Lud Kramer became the youngest Secret...
Stan Stapp (1918-2006) was the longtime publisher of the North Central Outlook, one of Seattle's most respected and influential community newspapers, and a mentor to two generations of "underground" a...
George Watkin Evans was a pioneering mining engineer in Washington who spent much of his career studying and documenting the state's coal-mining industry. This People's History of Evans's life and wor...
The rapid development that brought Everett into being came with a price and nowhere is this better told than in the newspapers and photographs of the time. It can be imagined that many families, arriv...
This reminiscence by Milan DeRuwe (1917-2006) describes his life growing up on a family farm near Colville, Washington, the hardships of the Great Depression, the process of losing the farm and going ...
Hunter Brown (1992-2017) wrote this account of locating and then traveling to the site of Cherry Grove, Illinois. Cherry Grove was the town the Denny/Boren family left behind in April 1851 when they s...