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Profiles of Washington Territorial Librarians – Sylvester Hill Mann, 1870

Profiles of Washington Territorial Librarians – Sylvester Hill Mann, 1870

From the Desks of the Central Library Staff He was born May 6, 1817 in upstate New York. Raised in Pennsylvania, Mann was a soldier in a volunteer unit during the Civil War in 1862-1863. His occupation as a Methodist minister took him all over the Pacific Northwest. The Mann family arrived in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley via the Isthmus route in 1864. By 1870 Rev. Mann was sent to Olympia, where he found himself appointed to fill out the…

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160 celebration: Priest Point Mythbusting

160 celebration: Priest Point Mythbusting

[One bit of folklore concerning the Washington State Library Territorial Collection has to do with the original source of ownership for a dozen books, mostly vellum bound and chiefly dating back to the 1500s. When old catalogers gather around the campfire at night, they tell tales of the ancient books in WSL that were initially part of the library at the Catholic Mission in Priests Point, in north Olympia. And if this is fact, these library books predate all others…

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