Topic: People's Histories
This is a letter by Cary Allen Mullenix (1827-1889) relating information about his 1889 trip from Fredonia, Kansas, to Seattle and Kitsap County, Washington. The letter was printed in a Kansas newspap...
Gaelic football is the summertime focus of the Irish Heritage Society. This is a distinctively Irish sport combining elements of soccer, Australian football, and rugby. Usually played "15-a-side" with...
This People's History was drawn from an interview recorded on June 2, 2012, with Gail Bertsch Chism (b. 1945), a resident of Lowell, Everett's oldest neighborhood. At the time, Chism was helping to pl...
For a good part of the last century, Gai's Northwest Bakeries was Seattle's largest bakery, supplying high-end restaurants and fast-food chains alike, and stocking area grocery stores with breads and ...
This is a reminiscence of the 1930s by Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011), who as a young woman worked as a teller at the Green Lake bank. It is a humorous but kindly remembrance of the Fridays when the ...
John Cyrus Gayton was the oldest son of John Jacob Gayton (1899-1969) and Virginia Clark Gayton, and grandson of John T. Gayton (1866-1954), early Seattle pioneer. He grew up imbued with the sense of ...
Thomas (Tomas) L. Gayton was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, the grandson of black pioneers John T. Gayton and Magnolia (Scott) Gayton. Tomas began writing verse soon after graduating with a J...
This appreciation was written by Walt Crowley in 2003 while assisting George Benson in organizing and publishing a memoir for his family. A popular Capitol Hill druggist, brass band musician, and five...
Spokane historian Jerome Peltier interviewed pioneer George Washington Sutherland (1854-1949) in the 1940s, and in 1989 prepared this account for The Pacific Northwesterner. It describes Sutherland&ac...
Anne Gerber (1910-2005) was a lifelong supporter of contemporary, cutting-edge art in Seattle. She and her husband Sid Gerber (d. 1965) were collectors both of modern art and of Native American art. T...
Glynn Ross, the founding director of Seattle Opera, was known for putting Seattle on the international opera map. But he did not do so alone. His Italian-born wife, Angelamaria Solimene Ross, known as...
Father Joseph Cataldo (1837-1928), born Giuseppe Maria Cataldo in Sicily, was a Jesuit missionary who served the Pacific Northwest and its Native American communities for 60 years. He founded or serve...
This is a recollection of Glenn Hughes by his son, Glenn "Chip" Hughes Jr. Glenn Hughes was author of A History of the American Theater, 1700-1950, and other works, and founded the University of Washi...
This People's History was contributed by Diana Schafer Ford. It is about the migration to the West of her great grandfather Charles McDowell in the 1880s.
Film star Frances Farmer (1913-1970) was a senior at West Seattle High School in April 1931 when she gained her first taste of national notoriety, with this award-winning essay, titled "God Dies." The...
On March 30, 2004, HistoryLink Executive Director Walt Crowley (1947-2007) interviewed Gordon Clinton (1920-2011), who served as Seattle's mayor from 1956 to 1964. This was during a pivotal period in ...
The following account was excerpted from an interview with Oscale Grace Holden (b. 1930), the daughter of Oscar Holden (1886-1969), who was, according to Paul DeBarros in Jackson Street After Hours: T...
In this letter to her grandmother, 12-year-old Helen Muhl (later Reichert, 1895-1988) describes her view of the festivities surrounding the May 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet to Seattle. The flee...
This reminiscence of Seattle's Green Lake Theater was written by Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011). Her family moved to the Green Lake neighborhood around 1919. In 2009 Dorothea Nordstrand was...
This is a first person account reprinted from From the Ground Up: A Seattle Feminist Newspaper, June 1974. In it, Helen Dunn describes the inequities and gender politics of hospital work in the mid-19...
In this reminiscence, John Brace, great-grandson of Brace and Hergert Mill founder John S. Brace and grandson of Brace Lumber Company cofounder Nick Brace remembers life in the Brace Lumber family and...
Mariano Guiang (1904-1992), a Filipino boxer, emigrated from the Philippines to live in Seattle, arriving at the age of 19 on June 12, 1924. This is a reminiscence excerpted from a longer interview co...
Joseph Banyan Hall migrated to Spokane Falls in Washington Territory in 1884, working as a blacksmith and raising cattle and wheat. He later went into the hardware business in Spokane. Hall penn...
Grant Haller (1944-2017) worked for 40 years as a newspaper photographer in Everett and Seattle, his career starting with Vietnam War protests and ending only when the Seattle Post-Intellige...