Topic: People's Histories
Michael Atkins relays the story of William Hamilton, an Irishman who came to Seattle in 1909. One of Hamilton's grand nieces in Ireland posted a query on a usenet group on the internet. Intrigued, Atk...
Agnes "Aggie" Guttormsen Johnson (b. 1928), is an Everett native. After graduating from Providence Everett School of Nursing in 1949 Agnes was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and admitted to Fir...
In 1980, a year after graduating from the University of Washington, Kevin Catherine Castle was in the first group of women to join International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Seattle Local 19, ...
Homer Venishnick, born in Renton, Washington in 1926, comes from a long line of fishermen whose livelihoods have hinged on the ebb and flow of local rivers. Today he lives in a house he built 50 years...
There have been nearly 160 flour mills in the state of Washington. In 1870 there were 22,573 in the United States. Why were there so many mills, and where did they all go? Why should we be interested?...
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a Socialist activist in the Spokane Free Speech fight that began in October 1909. The free speech movement was an action by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (I...
This timeline of Washington's volcanic politics was prepared by HistoryLink.org for The Seattle Times and published in its Sunday Opinion Section on October 30, 2005.
This op-ed piece was written by Walt Crowley after the passage, on November 4, 1997, of Initiative 41, a Seattle initiative that called for an expanded monorail. It appeared in the Seattle Post-Intell...
In this People's History, HistoryLink Executive Director Marie McCaffrey recalls her role in the October 3, 2017, return visit by Günter Gräwe, a German prisoner of war during World War II, ...
Anna Clark Fortescue was an early resident of the Inglewood community, in what is today the northern part of the city of Sammamish (King County). Her parents arrived in Inglewood in 1906, and in 1908 ...
In this People's History, Frank Chesley (1929-2010) recalls his six years working for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a TV columnist. From 2003 until his retirement in 2009, Frank was a staff histor...
Frank Fitts (1884-1967) grew up in Seattle at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a founder of the Phinney Ridge Improvement Association which worked to extend electrical service in Seattle's No...
Danna C. Clancy of Tacoma found this account of the Hellenthal family and early life in Columbia City. It was written by her husband's great uncle on April 4, 1974.
This People's History consists of contemporary newspaper accounts of the Franklin Mine Disaster of August 24,1894, and portions of the investigative report by the official state mines inspector. With ...
Roy Franklin was a legendary island bush pilot and the primary founder of commercial aviation in the San Juan Islands, the archipelago located in Northwest Washington between the mainland and Canada's...
The now-abandoned mining town of Franklin on the Green River in Southeast King County just east of Black Diamond grew up in the 1880s around mines extracting coal from the many coal seams in the Green...
This is a 1958 interview of Fred Grow, a Bainbridge Island pioneer, by Natalie Rudolf. Fred Grow arrived as a child about 1881, and grew up to become a deputy sheriff and later a Justice of the Peace ...
This history of the Frederick & Nelson Department Store is by Gordon Padelford, age 13 at this writing (May 2002). Gordon Padelford is the great grandson of the founder of the store, Donald Edward...
This biography of Donald Edward Frederick, co-founder of the Frederick & Nelson Department Store, is by Frederick's great grandson, Gordon Padelford. Gordon Padelford is age 13 at this writing (Ma...
This biography of Fay (Swick) Frederick, wife of the founder of Frederick & Nelson's Department Store, was written by her great grandson, Gordon Padelford. It is an unusual and slightly juicy biog...
From a police officer's vantage point, former UW police officer David Wilma recounts the anti-war protests of May 5, 1970, a response to the United States invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. ...
Many histories of the San Juan Islands and of Friday Harbor, the town on San Juan Island that is the county seat of San Juan County, report that the protected bay known as Friday Harbor (from which th...
Jerzy Friedrich was a Seattle resident who arrived in the Pacific Northwest in 1959. He was born in Lwow, Poland, in 1920, and his life intersected with the ravages and traumas of World War II in Euro...
The Bartell Drug Company, the oldest drugstore chain in the United States, has thrived throughout most of its 120-year history, with the exception of several decades spanning the 1950s to the 1970s. T...