walks

After my talk in Everett yesterday, I revisited the site of the Everett Massacre, a confrontation on the waterfront that led to at least seven deaths one hundred years ago.  When I wrote Walking Washington’s History: Ten Cities, there was nothing marking the site on Port Gardner Bay, but an audience member told me there was now a plaque.   Sure enough a plaque sits at the western foot of Hewitt Ave. where a brick spur ends at the railroad tracks.  This isn’t the exact spot where shots rang out on the City Dock, November 5, 1916, but it’s close.  The plaque is grounded on granite that should outlast the shifting sands of both the waterfront and historical interpretation.

My eye was drawn beyond the rock to a more temporary and more moving memorial–eleven cedar wreaths, red ribbons intertwined, hung on a fence, each with the name of a man killed or missing in the worst labor-management conflict in Washington history. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. or Wobblies) had been beaten and chased back to Seattle when they tried to support a shingle-weavers strike in the mills.  They returned by boat and were met at the dock by the sheriff and a force of deputized men.  A shot rang out, and in the ensuing battle, at least five Wobblies died, as well as two deputized citizens.  Another six or seven Wobblies went missing, never reclaiming the union cards they had left in Seattle that morning. They may have drowned after being shot or jumped into the water to escape the firing.  Another 50 were wounded.

Each wreath bears the name of a “fellow worker” who died that day.  They were hung by contemporary members of the I.W.W. who then completed the march the Wobblies had intended in 1916, to the Speakers Corner at Hewitt and Wetmore.  The wreaths hang on a fence with a No Trespassing sign, still drawing lines between corporate interests and public access.

The Everett Herald published a detailed discussion of the clash near its 100th anniversary.

My walking tour of Everett in Walking Washington’s History ends at the site of the massacre.  For more historic walking tours of Everett, visit www.historiceverett.org

Attending the Washington State Trails Coalition Conference last weekend, I enjoyed a history walk through Richland’s urban greenbelt led by Nancy Doran.  The narrated walk embodied what I call a virtual trail, a walk on sidewalks, trails, even through parking lots when a detour was necessary–all connected by a story, the story of Richland’s World War II history.  My literary acquaintance with Richland comes through Paul Loeb’s Nuclear Culture and Kathleen Flenniken’s volume of poetry, Plume. This on the ground walk brought more social history into the picture.

Richland was a small farming town with only 247 residents when the United States government plucked it and the nearby towns of Hanford and White Bluffs off the map as the perfect place to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb.  Farms, homes, and some businesses were forced out in 1943 and housing for 11,000 workers was quickly built.  Richland became a bedroom community.  We walked past the alphabet homes–built on floorplans A, B, D, E,F or G–with the goal of having high and low income earners living side by side.  We saw the site of the women’s dormitories, which anticipated the housing needs of single women workers.  We saw the few buildings that preceded the 1940s, the current high school with the Bombers mascot, and a lovely walkway along Hip Deep Creek to the riverfront trail.  The Sacajawea Heritage Trail goes for miles along the Columbia River, connecting the Tri-Cities.

Much of the architecture along the way reflected the technology and mid-century modern tone of the city.  The thoughtful planning of G. Albin Pehrson left parkland as a buffer between homes and businesses, land through which the paved urban trail goes today. For those without a guide, the trail is marked in the sidewalk but volunteer-led history tours are periodically offered through Richland’s Parks and Recreation Department.

A brochure by Gary Fetterolf, “Walking Tour of World War II Era Alphabet Homes,” describes the alphabet homes and the origin of street names, named after army engineers.  It is available at the new Hanford Reach Museum, a concrete structure rising out of the windswept ground, which broadens the story to the river and the land around it.

Renton is the 9th largest city in Washington, with a population of more than 100,000.  Yet it has been overshadowed by neighboring Seattle and Bellevue, which rank 1st and 5th, and by its association with industry and jobs–coal mining, clay works, Boeing and PACCAR.  Even though it has a 405 and Rainier Avenue, the main routes of travel, bypass the main street at a fast clip.

During its centennial in 2001, the city marked a walking tour with markers designed by Doug Kyes with text by Barbara Nilson.  Number one is land where the Duwamish had lived for hundreds of years, at the confluence of the Cedar and Black rivers.  The Cedar River still runs through the middle of the city, but only a remnant of the Black River remains after the lowering of Lake Washington in 1916.

The community of Renton began when seams of coal were discovered near streams in 1873.  A lumberman, Captain William Renton, financed the Renton Coal Company, which opened a mine on the north side of Renton Hill.  He was also a trustee of the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad which transported the coal.  The town incorporated in 1901.  Located at the south end of Lake Washington along the railroad and a road to Seattle, Renton became a place where Seattle workers lived.

Renton’s moment of historical significance in Washington, its period of largest growth, was during World War II.  The Seattle Railroad Car and Manufacturing Company, which became PACCAR, had moved to Renton in 1907 and produced 30 Sherman tanks a month during the war.  The Boeing Airplane Company located a major factory on the north side of Renton and began turning out B-29s at the peak rate of six a day.  Thousands of workers flocked to the city seeking work, and the War Department helped build multi-family units.  In the decades after the war, Renton became the “Jet Capital of the World.”

The latest new neighbors are the Seattle Seahawks, with a training facility on Lake Washington.  Like many cities along Puget Sound, Renton must deal with contaminated properties on its waterfront, particularly the Port Quendall properties where creosote and coal tar were manufactured.  The city has enhanced enjoyment of the Cedar River with a walking and biking trail and the city library built over it.

To discover the real downtown of Renton, follow the “History Lives Here” walking tour, available online or by brochure at the Renton History Museum, 235 Mill Ave. South.

And does anyone know if there is any historical significance to this mural painted on a building in downtown Renton?

As I researched and wrote Walking Washington’s History: Ten Cities, I knew that local historians would know much more about their cities.  I relied on their written work, talked and walked with many of them, visited local libraries and historical societies and hoped for the best.  As Dean Kahn of The Bellingham Herald wrote with insight, “summarizing local history goes quickly while researchers’ work clarifying and correcting history is a much slower process.”  An error can easily become part of the historical record, repeated without further research by historians and writers down the line.

Such an error is the source of the bricks that built the Richards and Company Building in Bellingham.  These aren’t ordinary bricks but the longest lasting bricks in a building in the state.  Constructed in 1858, the warehouse and store catered to several thousand miners who were camped in Bellingham waiting for construction of a trail to the Fraser River gold rush.  I wrote that the bricks were “shipped as ballast in ships from Philadelphia around Cape Horn through San Francisco.”  Search the Internet and you will find this “fact” stated many places:  the Legacy Washington project on the Secretary of State’s page, in HistoryLink, on the City of Bellingham website, and on the Whatcom County Historical Society website.  I’m in good company here.

The permanence of this very brick, however, has provided time for more research.  A study of the bricks made during a Save Our History project discovered that the bricks were manufactured in San Francisco and shipped to Bellingham on the bark Ann Parry.  The evidence?  In the spring of 2012 the bricks were matched to a fragment of Nagel brick, made by a brick maker of that name in San Francisco.  A good description of this discovery  is on the website of the Whatcom County Historical Society.

One piece of history has been clarified by good research, and the updating begins.