The following 8th grade exit exam materials for Washington State in 1910 were supplied by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Olympia, Washington, with the following instructions to county superintendents and classroom teachers:
No matter the school district or the teacher or the time of year — story after story told by school students in the early 20th century concerned their problems with a cantankerous bull.
By the time we’ve matured enough to reach the age of reason, most of us have forgotten the details of our journey. How, exactly, did we learn to read? Or to add and subtract? Or to spell, even our own names? Yet snippets of our earliest instruction remain.
It’s a project we’re thinking of calling something like “Life on the Wild Side: Ultimate Dispatch Reports.”
From the earliest days of maritime tattooing, sailors have covered themselves in images that symbolize their lives at sea. Designs represent faraway loved ones, everyday duties, personal triumphs and the many superstitions that dictate life on board.
There sure were some colorful characters in the Deep River area when I was a kid. At that time, being a man generally meant working hard (mainly in the woods) and then playing hard. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that many of these guys were World War II veterans during the imme…
The first school in Pacific County was built by Alexander Holman in 1853 for use by his own children and for the children of neighbors James Johnsons and John Meldrum.
This list of rules for 19th century teachers appeared at the end of “Pioneer Schools of the Naselle-Gray’s River Valley” by Louise Holm Hunter, published in a 1993 Sou’wester magazine. There is no indication that these particular expectations were ever actually in effect in early Pacific Cou…
Cecelia “Janey” Haguet was born in 1848 on her parents’ Donation Land Claim near present-day Ilwaco. She was educated at Providence Academy in Vancouver, Washington, and before she married was one of the early schoolteachers in Pacific County.
Ask almost anyone about their memories of school and you are bound to hear about at least one teacher who made a difference — usually for good, but sometimes for another reason. And certainly, in the first-hand accounts by early Pacific County students, teachers loom large in the telling. Th…
So far, all of the recollections I have written down have been about life in the Deep River area. This one involves a short period in my childhood that I spent in Fallon, Nevada. This is one of those stories that we all have that is more fun in retrospect than it was at the time it was occurring.
For as long as I can remember, Walter Davis came over to my grandmother’s house every Sunday. They played rummy, talked in Finnish and had coffee and pastry. Every Sunday was the same routine. Walter was a bachelor and he lived over the hill along Salmon Creek. He was known to squeeze a penn…
Did you ever turn off the Astoria-Megler bridge and head east on State Route 401 toward Naselle, skirting the river… and in a forest wilderness, suddenly have your heart broken by a vast range of ungirded pilings in a glassy bay of mythic beauty?
The crew are mustered in the waist [aft of the mainmast] and the captain in on the poop [aftermost deck] when a cry comes from somewhere forward:
In 1940, Arthur E. Skidmore wrote about the old South Bend School which was built in 1871. He went there as a student and, later, taught at the school, himself. His stories about how he managed to get to school from his home in the present-day Raymond area when he was yet a student (and to s…
Catherine “Kay” McGowan Garvin (1911-2010) grew up in the town which had the same name as she did — a circumstance she didn’t much like as a child. But, at least, she once confided, she was spared going to the McGowan School. When the railroad tunnel went through in the early 1900s and trans…
Verna Smith Oller was born Feb. 25, 1912, and was 95 years young when she and I talked about her growing up years on the Peninsula.
During my sophomore year at Naselle High School, I thought I would become a pole vaulter. I placed nails every six inches or so from 6 foot on up on two poles I cut out in the woods. These were my uprights. For a cross bar, I came up with a bamboo pole that had been in the center of a role o…
Line-crossing ceremonies are a centuries-old tradition in the maritime world. Some people say the earliest line-crossing ceremonies date back to the age of the Vikings, while others believe modern-day ceremonies originate from religious rituals on ships during the 1600s.
Even 100 years ago, second only to getting anywhere by foot (or by “shank’s mare” as pedestrian travel was sometimes called) would undoubtedly have been by horse. But when the destination was school, a horse wasn’t very practical. There were matters of feed and water and shelter to consider …
No matter the school district or the teacher or the time of year — story after story told by school students in the early 20th century concerned their problems with a cantankerous bull.
By the time we’ve matured enough to reach the age of reason, most of us have forgotten the details of our journey. How, exactly, did we learn to read? Or to add and subtract? Or to spell, even…
It’s a project we’re thinking of calling something like “Life on the Wild Side: Ultimate Dispatch Reports.”
From the earliest days of maritime tattooing, sailors have covered themselves in images that symbolize their lives at sea. Designs represent faraway loved ones, everyday duties, personal trium…
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There sure were some colorful characters in the Deep River area when I was a kid. At that time, being a man generally meant working hard (mainly in the woods) and then playing hard. I think a …
The first school in Pacific County was built by Alexander Holman in 1853 for use by his own children and for the children of neighbors James Johnsons and John Meldrum.
This list of rules for 19th century teachers appeared at the end of “Pioneer Schools of the Naselle-Gray’s River Valley” by Louise Holm Hunter, published in a 1993 Sou’wester magazine. There i…
Cecelia “Janey” Haguet was born in 1848 on her parents’ Donation Land Claim near present-day Ilwaco. She was educated at Providence Academy in Vancouver, Washington, and before she married was…
Ask almost anyone about their memories of school and you are bound to hear about at least one teacher who made a difference — usually for good, but sometimes for another reason. And certainly,…
So far, all of the recollections I have written down have been about life in the Deep River area. This one involves a short period in my childhood that I spent in Fallon, Nevada. This is one o…
For as long as I can remember, Walter Davis came over to my grandmother’s house every Sunday. They played rummy, talked in Finnish and had coffee and pastry. Every Sunday was the same routine.…
Did you ever turn off the Astoria-Megler bridge and head east on State Route 401 toward Naselle, skirting the river… and in a forest wilderness, suddenly have your heart broken by a vast range…
The crew are mustered in the waist [aft of the mainmast] and the captain in on the poop [aftermost deck] when a cry comes from somewhere forward:
In 1940, Arthur E. Skidmore wrote about the old South Bend School which was built in 1871. He went there as a student and, later, taught at the school, himself. His stories about how he manage…
Catherine “Kay” McGowan Garvin (1911-2010) grew up in the town which had the same name as she did — a circumstance she didn’t much like as a child. But, at least, she once confided, she was sp…
Verna Smith Oller was born Feb. 25, 1912, and was 95 years young when she and I talked about her growing up years on the Peninsula.
During my sophomore year at Naselle High School, I thought I would become a pole vaulter. I placed nails every six inches or so from 6 foot on up on two poles I cut out in the woods. These wer…
Line-crossing ceremonies are a centuries-old tradition in the maritime world. Some people say the earliest line-crossing ceremonies date back to the age of the Vikings, while others believe mo…
Even 100 years ago, second only to getting anywhere by foot (or by “shank’s mare” as pedestrian travel was sometimes called) would undoubtedly have been by horse. But when the destination was …
I don’t know if parents or grandparents still tell kids about “walking five miles to school in snow two feet deep — uphill both going and coming home!” True or not, the tales of the rigors of …
In my early years, I wanted to be what we called a “man’s man.” A man’s man was someone the other guys looked up to and admired. I didn’t have sense enough to look around and see what fellows …
School was held in Oysterville as early as 1860 and perhaps before. Pupils met in various locations and teachers were paid through subscription funds collected in the community. Oysterville pu…
Tucker Wachsmuth’s best guess is that his great-grandparents arrived in Oysterville in 1870. They came in time to be counted on the 1870 U. S; Census: Meinert, age 28, Day Laborer from Schlesi…
When, on Feb. 26, 1852, property owners of Pacific City were ordered to vacate the site immediately to make way for a military reservation within which Fort Canby would be located, James Duval…
Over the years, the Wachsmuth Family of Oysterville has kept closely in touch with their German relatives and have even adapted a beloved school tradition that involves a School Pretzel Bread …
The first two weeks of September in this Sheltering Year of 2020 appeared to be much the same in Oysterville as those same calendar weeks in any year since 1957.
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SEATTLE — Vital symbols of the ancient Chinook Indian Nation culture have been installed at the east entrance of the Burke Museum at the University Washington’s main campus.
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It’s hard to find, unless you’re an awed duck hunter idling your boat up on a fall afternoon, or a sea lion venturing among the makeshift posts that replaced rotted pilings. Pillar Rock Packin…
We had a school bus driver, Clarence Hedlund, who seemed to be humor impaired. To this day, I still don’t know what I did that caused him to kick me off the school bus, but he did. He would pi…
Now that I am a “senior citizen,” I find myself harboring negative thoughts about some of the clothing and accessories worn by a large segment of our young people of today. A ball cap on backw…
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As the last decade of the 19th century rolled into view, the recently platted towns of Sealand and Nahcotta on the North Beach Peninsula were not only on the cutting edge of a new era, they we…
“Plungers” were the ubiquitous sail boats predominate on Shoalwater Bay from the 1850s until the late 1880s. Perhaps they were best described by Frank Turner (1882-1961) in his column “From Au…
Another familiar name for Stanley Point (the location of dream-cities Stanley, Napoleon, and Chetlo Harbor) is Cougar Bend. Of all the names for that particular location on the Naselle River, …
Much to the amusement of other settlements around the shores of the newly named “Willapa” Bay, the slogan “Baltimore of the Pacific” continued to be used for promotional purposes long after th…
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
“A lightship,” the book “Observing Our Peninsula’s Past” says, “is a floating lighthouse, a vessel anchored at sea to mark exceptional navigation hazards, and it is meant to be noticed. Its hu…
The Naselle-Grays River Valley communities had a lot of Finns and “Scandahoovians” back in the 1950s and ’60s. As a result, a number of customs from their ancestral homelands found their way i…
You’ve probably noticed a few buildings near the Astoria waterfront standing around in seeming reproach of passing time.
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Paint a nostalgic picture: two boys in a boat, first light, gray as a tarnished coffee pot. Hard wind out of the north, incoming tide rising steadily on Willapa Bay. A light rain begins to fal…
On March 16, 1915, around 10,000 people gathered at the mouth of the Columbia River to welcome the Great Northern, a palatial high-speed cruiser. The ship had been built, along with its sister…
Some years ago, Deep River resident and part-time Chinook Observer correspondent, Richard (Nick) Nikkila, began to write down his memories of growing up in Deep River during the 1950s and earl…
Slang is unofficial and unconventional. It lives outside the bounds of “proper” use of language, yet it reflects how people really talk to one another.
A tidbit for history buffs: An interesting but sad website, “Death Certificates of Finns in Pacific County, Washington, 1908-1950,” excerpted from files belonging to the Family History Center …
COLUMBIA RIVER — Kent Craford’s wife used to joke that she’d probably have to bury him in the old gillnet boat he bought on a whim when they were young and broke and that for years his childre…
Some years ago, Deep River resident and part-time Observer correspondent, Richard (Nick) Nikkila, began to write down his memories of growing up in Deep River during the 1950s and early 60s. E…
Many, many years before the coming of the white man, the Indians travelled over a route leading from the mouth of the Columbia River to Puget Sound, by the way of Shoalwater Bay and Grays Harb…
“He always went by J.A., never by John or Alvin,” said Morehead’s granddaughter Dorothy Trondsen Williams. “In later life, his pride and joy was Morehead Park. He constructed picnic tables, co…
The year 1889 was a big one for B. Aksel Seaborg of Ilwaco. In January, at the Pacific County Courthouse in Oysterville, he filed the plat for his newly created town of Sealand. As a major sto…
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If only I’d known enough then to ask…
Being isolated from the coronavirus pandemic gave lots of time to reminisce about remarkable changes that have transformed the world and reshaped our lives since the 1930s. They’re changes mos…
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The other day, as I began work on an essay about the first Columbia River Lightship, No. 50, I checked something in Jim Gibbs’s book, “Pacific Graveyard.” That set me to thinking about Gibbs’s…
For those of us who have known the Lower Columbia for the better part of a century, the little settlement of McGowan almost comes into focus as we drive the highway between the Fort Columbia t…
Back in the day, before Bruceport fell in, the settlement enjoyed a brief period of fame as county seat. Not the Pacific County seat, however. From 1854 until 1860, the little town on the east…
Mark Winant
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