Would you like to bend time and travel to pioneer days in Washington territory?  Volunteers at the Washington State Library find themselves re-living the lives of settlers through the pages of historical newspapers published from 1852 to 1889.   If you enjoy Washington State history, you may want to work a few hours a week reading articles electronically and entering keywords, titles, and subjects into a searchable database.  Library users can then access the newspapers online. 

 What kind of stories might you read?  Almost every town’s newspaper described the glorious opportunities available to any who had the gumption to immigrate to their promising location.  The drama of life and death, in the form of births, deaths, marriages and divorces were regularly printed.  Politics, both blatant and concealed, motivated many of the early editors and publishers to promote a particular party’s platform or candidate.  And don’t forget those important social occasions:  balls, holiday parades, birthday parties, picnics, church teas, and year-end school promotions/graduations.  Descriptions of military encampments, Native American treaties and reservations, and pioneer land claims paint a picture of changing demographics.  National events were excerpted from other papers when available.

The Historical Newspapers Online project gives researchers, students, teachers, and genealogists free access to historical information via computer, 24 hours a day.  Specialized searches include:

Personal Names Search access to births, deaths, marriages, divorces or general search

Moments in History links to newspaper articles about pivotal events in Washington State history

Advanced Search limit by newspaper title, article type, year, or keywords

For further information about volunteering, please contact:

Beth Bowden – Historical Newspapers Online Coordinator– 360.570.5570

The Washington State Library (WSL) recently awarded Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) the contract to digitize 100,000 newspaper images from microfilm. The contract is part of WSL’s National Digital Newspaper (NDNP) grant, recently awarded by the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), to digitize historic Washington newspapers.

OCLC has a long history of working with historic newspapers and currently maintains the database of  the U.S. Newspaper Program (USNP), an initiative to microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the 18th century to the present; the foundation for NDNP.

Titles that were published within the 1880-1922 timeframe will be selected by the WA-NDNP selection committee and microfilm will be evaluated by WSL staff before it is sent to OCLC for digitization and conversion to full-text, searchable files. The output files will then be evaluated by WSL staff to assure quality before a copy of the files are sent to the Library of Congress and published within the Chronicling America website.

OCLC has worked with other NDNP awardees and offers experience with and knowledge of the rigorous NDNP grant specifications. We look forward to working with OCLC on a project of this scope and importance.

San Juan Island Heritage has become the second Washington Rural Heritage collection to be cataloged at the item level in WorldCat.  Washington Rural Heritage participants with published collections should expect to see their items similarly cataloged in the near future; the majority of these collections have been registered with OCLC and the crosswalk process from Dublin Core/xml to good old fashioned MARC is underway.

Also of note: according to Laura Tretter at the San Juan Island Library, October’s presentation on the Jim Crook Collection was a great success.  Over 70 people came to hear Mike Vouri’s talk about English Camp and the Crook Family.  Slides from the presentation are now available in the San Juan Island Heritage collection: The Crook Family: Caretakers of English Camp.

From the desk of Evan Robb

Who is this man standing in a field somewhere near Grandview, Washington? Will we learn even a small part of his story? Or will he remain unidentified indefinitely? A fascinating part of working on a digital library project with contributors dispersed across an entire state is that we regularly see material before it has been cataloged or described in any way. The faces staring back at us from black-and-white photos often seem to suggest their own stories (some even beg to be the basis for entire novels), but we can only ever guess at the true nature of the content depicted. The images shown here were recently added to the Grandview Heritage collection, and are a small part of a photo album presented, at some point in time, to the Grandview Commercial Club, by the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company. Our local subject experts in Grandview are hard at work indexing the document; all we can do is wait in expectation, and hope that some of our questions will be answered.

In the meantime, the rest of Grandview Heritage (the newest collection in Washington Rural Heritage) was recently published, and just in time, as the city of Grandview is readying for its Centennial celebration. This diverse collection includes material from the collections of the Bleyhl Community Library and R.E. Powell Museum. Of particular interest: a collection of artwork by Grandview/Yakima Valley artist Blanche McClane Cook (1901-1991); a collection of Grandview High School class photos from as early as 1913; and material from the R.E. Powell Museum, such as a vintage barbed wire collection and the locally famous mastodon bone (read a bit about its digitization here; see exactly where it was found on our map, here).

In honor of Grandview’s upcoming Centennial, we thought we’d point to a few great “firsts” taken from what is perhaps the centerpiece of the Grandview Heritage collection, The History of Grandview.

• First baby born in Grandview, 1907.
• First bakery.
• First bank.
• First postmistress, Mrs. A.E. Sykes, atop a beautiful Appaloosa (a true Pacific Northwest horse breed).
• First fruit sizer in Yakima County.
• First baseball game.

Who doesn’t enjoy a little escapist literature now and then? Serial stories in Washington’s territorial newspapers provided much-needed relief for early pioneers. Whether settlers craved romance, civilization, or wealth, it was all there for the reading.

Consider these titles: A Girl’s Mistake, Between Four Walls, The Other Englishman, Miss Clare, and Mrs. Gainsborough’s Diamonds. Stories often featured young women navigating social and romantic liaisons. Those ending successfully proved that moral virtue was rewarded. Conversely, failed relationships warned readers not to challenge society’s mores.

Pioneers lived vicariously through the characters’ luxuries, quandaries, and griefs. The stories recalled a time and place from which many had traveled, hoping to better themselves in the West. Perhaps the tales’ societal ideals filled a moral or cultural gap felt by the settlers in the frequently lawless frontier.

Another theme featured intrigue and adventure among the wealthy – reminiscent of the television series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Also popular were tales of military bravery and exploit, as in Two Soldiers (6 parts) 2 3 4 5 6.

Serials novels began in England with the publication of “London Spy” in 1698, and became more widespread in the Victorian Era beginning with Charles Dickens’ installments of the Pickwick Papers in 1836. Gaining in popularity over the next fifty years, they often lasted months and sometimes years before resolving their complicated plots. Shorter versions appeared in American newspapers, designed to attract a broader readership and larger subscriptions.

For your enjoyment:
A Girl’s Mistake 2 3 4
Between Four Walls 2 3
Dunraven Ranch A Story of American Frontier Life (11 parts) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Miss Clare 2 3
The Other Englishman 2

The Washington State Library (WSL) recently received a National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grant. Washington’s NDNP grant is managed by the Research & Development (R&D) team within the State Library and will fund the digitization of 100,000 newspaper pages from microfilm.

NDNP is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is managed in part by the Library of Congress (LC). The NDNP is an initiative that began in 2005 and “builds on the foundation established by an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program (USNP).”

Library of Congress: Chronicling America site

LC hopes to eventually have all historic American newspapers available online and searchable from their Chronicling America website.  

To accomplish Washington’s grant, we are working in partnership with the University of Washington Libraries and other academic and public libraries around the state. The main goal of the grant is to make the newspaper pages full-text searchable using OCR technology. Another important goal is to generate a sustainable and collaborative model for newspaper digitization in Washington State that can continue and build around the state, past this initial grant.

To find out more about Washington’s involvement in NDNP visit WA National Digital Newspaper Program Wiki or contact Laura Robinson, NDNP Coordinator at the Washington State Library.

When digitizing historical newspapers here at the Washington State Library, advertisements are an endless source of amusement. We find baroquely phrased and lovingly illustrated ads for cure-all potions, fancy frocks, watering holes, and the latest entertainments. I will share some of the standouts in future blog entries to give you a taste of some of 19th century Washingtonian’s preoccupations. Today, I will begin with one of America’s most beloved and derided traditions: the circus.

If you do a basic search for the word circus from our online pioneer newspaper page, you will find many articles announcing the arrival of new troupes with bombastic names: Bartholomew’s Great Western Circus Company, McMahon’s New United Shows, J.B. Shaw’s Great Silver Plate Combination. As you scroll through the pages of the newspapers, you’ll also find charming ads announcing the greatest! the newest! the most exciting attraction yet!

While some of the reviews suggest that the entertainment was rather stale and repetitive, most embrace the arrival of any circus troupe as an escape from small town monotony. A writer in the Spokane Falls Review (click the link, and see Column 5 for the article “Circus Day”) states in 1883, “There is one point in favor of shows coming to the Falls and that is that heretofore amusements of any kind have been so few that the people are willing to sacrifice themselves by patronizing even a poor performance in order to encourage traveling troupes to stop here.” Maybe the acts didn’t quite live up to the hype, but the ads still tantalize.

Click the image above to see the advertisement in its original context.

For further exploration:

Books

The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top – Janet M. Davis

The American Circus – John Culhane

Web Resources

Circus World

International Circus Hall of Fame

Ringling Museum of Art

The Ronald G. Becker Collection of Charles Eisenmann Photographs

Washington State Library Resources

Read more about WSL’s newspaper project here.

Explore the pioneer newspaper collection here.

Some of our real estate on the State Library home page

The Research & Development team at the Washington State Library is dedicated to building online access to the library’s historical books, maps, newspapers, and other special collections. We also work to create sustainable access to Washington State’s government publications and make it easier for citizens to find government information (FindIt Washington and FindIt Consumer).

We’re here to reach out to the history loving public and the library community as a whole. With this blog our goal is to highlight historically significant and amusing items from our collections as well as attempt to demystify the digitization process for libraries through occasional discussions about project planning, material selection, and digital imaging resources.

Please engage in this conversation with us and stay tuned for more….

"Eels Clinging to Rock at Kettle Falls"

This Kettle Falls photo made our skin crawl with anticipation for our upcoming collections. We’re discovering incredible images all the time and are dying to unveil them on-line! Keep your eyeballs peeled for:

• Enumclaw: trace this verdant community’s dairy and logging past through fascinating oral histories, the founding father’s memorandum book and beautiful objects from the Enumclaw Plateau Historical Society.
• Orcas Island: the island’s industry has ranged from farming, logging, brick-making and even lime-kilning, but tourism has been alive and well for many years. Re-discover the beauty of one of the state’s top vacation spots.
• Roslyn: this ethnically diverse community is steeped in mining tradition. Peek into the tumultuous life of the early miners.
• Vashon Island: the history of this artsy community is chronicled by scrapbooks, correspondence, and several books, including a military handbook for students attending the Vashon College and Academy.
• Kettle Falls: the falls are restored to their former splendor through riveting images. See how this community uprooted everything to make way for development.

We’re currently scouting for our next project participants! Don’t be frightened… contact us right away for more information.

"Jim Crook in Red Cap". Click on the image to read about how Jim lost his eye.

Arriving on the island in 1875 (when Jim was only two), the Crook family homesteaded a piece of land known as English Camp, formerly inhabited by British Troops during a 12-year border stand-off with the U.S. known as the Pig War. The Crook family built a working farm on the land, and Jim turned out to be made for pioneer life; he was a skilled farmer and carpenter, and an inveterate tinkerer and inventor. Looking through the collection, one can’t help but be astonished by his ingenuity, resourcefulness, and sheer industriousness. Just a handful of the things Jim did in the course of everyday life at English Camp:

– Designed a pulley system to automatically make his bed.
– Built a two-story house overlooking Garrison Bay.
– Constructed a sawmill on his property.  (The boards on this barn were cut using that mill.  Framing timbers were salvaged from logs along the beach.)
– Repurposed an old English saw pit for use as a forge.
– Raised sheep, harvested their wool, and built both a picker and a carder based on images he saw in catalogs…then spun said wool and made his own clothes.

Crook also took it upon himself to care for the historic structures at English Camp, such as the old English blockhouse.  He stayed on San Juan Island his entire life, and continued to live at English Camp after the property was deeded to the National Park Service in the 1960s.

A great place to start learning more about Jim Crook is this video, narrated by Jerry Larson, or this audio from an interview with Jerry Jameson.