From the desk of Evan Robb

A new grant cycle is open for Washington Rural Heritage, a statewide digitization initiative for small rural libraries and partnering organizations. To date, more than 60 cultural institutions throughout Washington have contributed to this growing digital collection of historically significant materials. Learn more about the project and see the full list of contributors here.

Both public and tribal libraries are eligible to apply for this grant; priority consideration will be given to libraries that have not previously received awards associated with Washington Rural Heritage. Overall funding to support this grant cycle is $50,000, with a maximum award of $10,000 per application. It is anticipated that five or more applicants may receive awards. Application deadline: Postmarked or received by April 29, 2011. View eligibility guidelines, FAQs, and download a grant application at www.sos.wa.gov/library/libraries/grants/grants.aspx.

For more information, contact Evan Robb, Project Manager, Washington Rural Heritage, 360-704-5228, [email protected], or Anne Yarbrough, Grants Program, 360-704-5246, [email protected].

Washington Rural Heritage is supported with Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funding provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Washington Rural Heritage is excited to introduce North Pend Oreille Heritage, coinciding with the town of Metaline Falls’ centennial.  This brand new collection from the Metalines Community Library contains stunning images of one of the most picturesque parts of the state and tells the story of the adventurous settlers that made this rugged land their home.

Rock formation blasted in 1936

The library houses several albums that were collected and organized decades ago in order to preserve the community’s history. The albums contain over a thousand early images of the area’s waterfalls, canyons and river views – many scenes have eroded or dammed and are no longer there – and photos depicting daily activities of everyone from the town barber to the founder of the town’s cement plant.

Meet Brownie, an amateur photographer and bartender at Pend Oreille Tavern, and his buddy Black Beauty, a bag-punching dog that slept in a human bed. Fall in love with George Marr and Marie Beach, a couple whose romance on the back of a motorcycle would one day lead to their marriage. And tag along with Art and Gertrude Baker, proprietors of Baker’s Saloon. They picnic at Sullivan Lake, go on hiking expeditions, and use canyon walls for target practice.

Hotel Washington in winter

When locals weren’t playing, they were working hard. Many came to the area for jobs in the mining industry, a huge part of this mineral and metal-rich area’s economy. The Pend Oreille Mines and Metals album contains 81 images, dating from the 1920s up to the 1970s, depicting the company’s longstanding presence in the area. It also holds a few photos of Diamond Match employees – during the 1920s, eighty percent of the county’s timber was used in match production.

From the desk of Evan Robb

The Washington Rural Heritage initiative is pleased to announce its newest digital collection: Wahkiakum County Heritage. A project of the Cathlamet Blanche Bradley Public Library in partnership with the Wahkiakum County Historical Society & Museum, the collection consists of more than 300 items depicting river life, fishing, forestry, and early homesteading along this lower stretch of Washington’s Columbia River.

Three sub-collections make up Wahkiakum County Heritage. The Wahkiakum Community Collection, which is comprised of material from the private collections of local citizens. The Cathlamet Blanche Bradley Public Library Collection, from the Library’s holdings. And the Wahkiakum County Historical Society Collection, from the Museum’s holdings, which comprises roughly half of the material in the collection. Together, they do an excellent job of documenting the small communities and landmarks of Wahkiakum County, including: Cathlamet, Puget Island, Skamokawa, Grays River, Deep River, Altoona, Brookfield, and Rosburg.

A few of our random favorites include:

• The Smalley family, Rosburg Grange Hall, August 1936.
• Images of horse seining for salmon on the Columbia.
• Loggers at Leisure.
• Funeral boats from Puget Island to Westport and In Skamokawa after a dance – both illustrating how the Columbia and its tributaries were used before the penetration of paved roads.
• A collection of John Fletcher Ford logging photographs. (More of this wonderful photographer’s work can be seen in a Flickr Commons set from Oregon State University).

Congratulations and a big thank you to: the Cathlamet Public Library’s director for managing the project; the project’s digitization contractor from Lower Columbia Community College Library (for many hours of dedicated scanning and cataloging); and to the Wahkiakum County Historical Society’s curator, whose local history expertise is evident in these wonderfully detailed records!

From the desk of Evan Robb

The American Library Association recently named Washington Rural Heritage its Digital Library of the Week. Read what ALA had to say about the collection at their I Love Libraries advocacy site. Congratulations to the 60+ cultural institutions (including 21 small, public libraries throughout Washington) participating in the initiative to date.

Seven Washington libraries are currently hard at work on LSTA-funded digitization projects for 2010-2011, and many WRH participants continue to build their digital collections on a non-grant-funded basis. Keep an eye out for two new collections, comprising more than 1,200 individually cataloged items, which will be published in coming weeks!

You can skim through a sampling of this diverse collection below, or visit the site directly at: www.washingtonruralheritage.org.

As part of their 2009 Washington Rural Heritage grant work, funded by LSTA, four libraries have added brand new material to their previously published collections.

Whitman County Library widened their digitization efforts this year and offered scanning services to patrons of all libraries in their district. Whitman County Heritage now includes material from all around the county — users can browse items by community from their home page and are able to view rare images from small towns like Ewan, Sunset, Malden and many more. The collection also includes items from several local cultural institutions. Be sure to check out the Palouse Empire Fair Collection, taken from scrapbooks containing ephemera and photos ranging from fair royalty and 4-H sewing entries to livestock and prize-winning exhibits. Even catch a celebrity sighting — local sons John Crawford and Yakima Canutt, famed actors from the 1970s, visited the fair.

Ellensburg Heritage now includes the Historic Transportation Photograph Collection, showcasing the planes, trains, automobiles, carriages and ferries used by travelers in decades past. See snowplows tunneling through 30 feet of snow, panoramic shots of the Ellensburg Air Base (be sure to zoom in for awesome detail!), and even a gang of ‘motorcycle fiends‘ that cruised around Ellensburg in the 1910s, “finding enjoyment in riding their machines up the precipice at the east end of Fourth Street.” Ellensburg also added to the Fred L. Breckon Historic Portraits Collection. See the town’s baker, doctor, and mayor.

This grant cycle, Columbia County Rural Library District embarked on a new effort to digitize graves from area cemeteries. View individual headstones from Bundy Hollow Cemetery, Covello Cemetery, and Highland Cemetery. Headstones are organized by cemetery and listed alphabetically on the left. Click a name to view the deceased’s headstone.

Newcomer Denny Ashby Library added the Garfield County Schoolhouse Collection to Pomeroy Heritage, featuring now-and-then images of the county’s schoolhouses, class photos and scenes from student life, including a rural tennis match. The collection also now includes images and video footage of the tramways used by area farmers to transport grain in the high bluffs to boats located on the Snake River. This ingenious system enabled farmers to quickly move their harvest several miles and to a much lower elevation without the aid of horses.

Volume 6, October 7, 2010 for the WSL Updates mailing list

Topics include:

1) NEW DIGITAL COLLECTION – SKAMANIA COUNTY HERITAGE

2) WORKPLACE BULLYING SURVEY

3) EXCEPTIONAL FAMILY LITERACY PROGRAMS RECOGNIZED

4) FREE BOOKS FOR DISCUSSION KITS OR COMMUNITY READS

5) PLA AWARD AND GRANT OPPORTUNITIES

6) ALCTS LIBRARY METADATA POLICY E-FORUM

7) EVALUATING MEDICAL INFORMATION ON THE WEB

8) FREE CE OPPORTUNITIES NEXT WEEK

Read the rest of this entry »

From the desk of Evan Robb

A new digital collection from the Washington Rural Heritage initiative highlights the history of Skamania County, located in the heart of Washington’s rugged Columbia River Gorge. For their 2009-2010 grant project, the Stevenson and North Bonneville Community Libraries (Fort Vancouver Regional Library District) worked with local residents and partners to digitize unique material telling the story of life in these communities. The result is a digital collection consisting of two sub-collections and over 250 items.

Stevenson Community Library’s
promotional flyer – History in Pictures Day

In June, 2010 after extensive planning and outreach to local residents, the Stevenson Community Library held its first “History in Pictures” day–a community-based digitization event aimed at gathering historically significant material held in local private collections. The event occurred on a Saturday, in the main room of the Stevenson Community Library. There, staff and members of the Library’s Friends group interviewed contributors, secured necessary permissions (to publish material online), and recorded detailed information about the originals–describing their content as well as their physical format and dimensions. Staff from the Washington State Library were on hand to assist with imaging the materials, which were then returned to their owners along with a digital copy. The event was a resounding success. A few of our favorite “finds” include:

• This stunning collection from a longtime resident, detailing early resort life (a bit of work, a bit of recreation) at various hot springs in the Carson River Valley along the Wind River.
• The Stevenson Oddfellows Lodge members, 1910 – 1920.
• A small collection documenting construction of State Highway 14 during the mid 1930s, including several images of tunnel construction in various locations as well as the laborers themselves.
• The 1924 Stevenson High School football team.
• 1935 photo of the Bonneville Dam’s maintenance crew.

Another important achievement of this grant project was the creation of the North Bonneville Collection which documents the relocation of the town of North Bonneville during the construction of the Bonneville Dam’s second powerhouse in the 1970s. The collection documents everything from: early negotiations with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; to images of “Old Town North Bonneville” as it was being razed; to construction of new town facilities and final dedication of the “New” North Bonneville in 1978. The material was contributed by the City of North Bonneville, which generously opened its archives to help create this unique and valuable educational resource.

Congratulations and a big thank you to the entire crew at the Stevenson and North Bonneville Community Libraries. They spent many hours forming local partnerships, managing the project, cataloging materials, and learning all the hands-on technical minutiae involved in digitization. The results speak for themselves!

Jessie and Lawrence Palmer, Benton City, 1908

From the desk of Evan Robb

The Washington Rural Heritage initiative is pleased to announce the first of several new digital collections we’ll be unveiling this fall. For its 2009-2010 grant project the Benton City branch of Mid-Columbia Libraries partnered with the Kiona-Benton City Historical Society to digitize a variety of materials highlighting the history of this rural community on Washington’s Yakima River. The collection documents agriculture, irrigation district development, and railroad construction in the area, and depicts some of Benton City’s earliest family farms and public figures.

Of particular interest are a collection of glass plate negatives from a local private collection. The negatives were discovered around 1970, in the attic of a home being rented by Benton City residents Chuck and Betty Morgan. Some of the negatives were enclosed in paper envelopes with short descriptions, presumably written by the unidentified photographer. When project staff sat down to examine the negatives in late February, 2010, we found more than a few cracks and glass shards, some scuffed and blurry images, and plenty of flaking photo emulsion. But as we began carefully scanning the negatives, we were astonished to find beautifully preserved images of Benton City from over a century ago. Images such as: Mrs. McAlpin’s sewing club (1903); a water wheel on the Yakima (1904); the Yakima River, frozen over at the Kiona Bridge (1909); and Stacking hay at J.B. Palmer’s farm (1908) (within moments of scanning this negative, Mid-Columbia Library staff excitedly reported that the photo was taken from the roughly the spot upon which we were standing-the Benton City Library!).

Other highlights of Kiona-Benton City Heritage:

• Material from the Benton City branch library collection, such as a 1912 promotional booklet written to entice land buyers to the area, and a 1959 local history of Benton City.  Thanks to the Library’s digitization efforts, Benton City students will now be able to research their town’s history from any computer with Internet access.
• A collection of paintings and screen prints by local artist, Bob Dunlap, who has been documenting Benton City’s people, places and events for decades (and sharing his knowledge with the community). A few of our favorites include this poster for the Benton City Jr. Rodeo; this painting of an early homestead; and this schedule of high school basketball games from 1965-66.
• Important texts documenting irrigation development in the area, including the 1917 formation of the Kiona Irrigation District.

The Benton City branch of Mid-Columbia Libraries will be celebrating the publication of this collection with an open house exhibition on Saturday, October 2, 10am-3pm (learn more). A big thanks to our participants in Benton City for their hard work researching, digitizing, and cataloging these materials. With the knowledge and experience they have gained over the past year, they will surely be able to sustain and build upon this fantastic local history collection!

A new LSTA grant cycle is now open for the Washington Rural Heritage Initiative, www.washingtonruralheritage.org. These grants are intended to support small and rural libraries in the development of sustainable digitization programs for photographs and other historical materials. To date, more than 50 libraries, museums and cultural institutions throughout Washington have contributed to the initiative and we’ve published almost 10,000 items on our site.

We wanted to give you a quick peek into what we’ve discovered and uncovered around the state as part of this year’s grant and digitization activity.

Last week, we scanned 15 of over 100 glass negatives that a community member brought in to the Benton City branch of Mid-Columbia Libraries. The negatives, housed in an old cardboard bowling ball box, contained the above image of two children observing a hay-stacking operation around the turn of the century. Upon further inspection, staff realized that the photo was taken at almost precisely the location where the library stands now!

We’ve also done quite a bit of scanning at the Sedro-Woolley Museum in partnership with the Sedro-Woolley Public Library. We’ve captured photos, maps, a pioneer’s journal and items relating to the infamous 1914 bank robbery that occurred downtown. The below image was taken from a set of 96 glass lantern slides created just after the event as part of a special presentation for the Majestic Theatre in Sedro-Woolley. They portray, in chilling detail, the crime’s events and characters, including Deputy Corlin (below), who was shot in the leg by one of the robbers.

These collections and more will be published later in the year.

Overall funding to support this grant cycle is $50,000, with a maximum award of $10,000 per application. It is anticipated that five or more applicants may receive awards. Application deadline: Postmarked or received by April 30, 2010. View eligibility guidelines, FAQs, and download a grant application at http://www.sos.wa.gov/library/libraries/grants/grants.aspx.

For more information, contact Evan Robb, Project Manager – Washington Rural Heritage, 360-704-5228, [email protected] or Jeff Martin, Grants Program, 360-704-5248, [email protected].

From the desk of Evan Robb

Today marks the 100 year anniversary of the “Great Flood” which devastated the town of Colfax in Whitman County, Washington.  Following three weeks of constant snow and rain throughout the Eastern Washington, the Palouse River, which runs through town, quickly overfilled its main channel and transformed into a raging torrent.

Photos of the Great Flood were recently contributed to the Washington Rural Heritage collection by former Colfax resident Patrick McDonald, who collected historic postcards of the event from various sources over the years.  These have been cataloged by the Whitman County Library as part of its Whitman County Heritage collection.  All of the 1910 flood photos can be seen here: http://www.sos.wa.gov/quicklinks/1910ColfaxFlood

An excerpt from the March 04, 1910 Colfax Gazette describes the scene:

Driftwood, timber and rubbish of all kinds was constantly coming down.  The danger point was reached, however, when the force of the water carried away all the bridges in the city… Next houses began to float downstream, some intact for a distance, others in rags and tatters, but all destined for the bone yard.  The mill, equipment, lumber and shingles of the J.R. Good & Co. mill floated down, followed by houses, barns, chicken coops and everything imaginable.

The rest of that article, which includes a description of the flood’s aftermath can be read here, a small part of the Washington State Library’s work on the National Digital Newspaper Project.

Whitman County Library is currently digitizing additional material for the Washington Rural Heritage initiative.  By this summer, the collection will surpass the 1,000-item mark, making it one of the initiative’s largest digital collections.  Currently, items in Whitman County Heritage are being viewed 4,000-5,000 times per month.