WEEKEND: West Jefferson County history featured today through Sunday
Published 12:01 am Saturday, November 15, 2014
WEST JEFFERSON COUNTY history will be explored this weekend at the Jefferson County Historical Society’s sixth annual West End Weekend today through Sunday.
Events will take place at Kalaloch Lodge, 157151 U.S. Highway 101, the Forks Timber Museum and the Peak 6 Adventure Store on the Upper Hoh Road.
The weekend will include tales of ship wrecks, World War I army loggers, native people, homesteaders and modern residents.
West Jefferson residents are invited to have their own stories recorded by members of the historical society’s Oral History Team throughout the weekend.
The recordings will become part of the oral history collection housed at the historical society’s research center in Port Townsend.
“I am always amazed people chose to homestead there. It’s such a remote place,” said Marsha Moratti, archivist for the historical society, which is based in Port Townsend.
“It was set up for farms and it was terrible land for farming,” she added.
“Those who remained have unique stories as to why they stayed.”
In the 21st century, West Jefferson County has a very small, very widely scattered population who remain in their ancestral homes — and some who have sought out the remote region — despite a lack of amenities and services in West Jefferson County, Moratti said.
“It’s beautiful place. It’s very isolated and unique place with its own special history,” she said.
Today
■ An exhibit of rare historic photographs of the Olympic Mountains by George Welch will open beginning at 5 p.m. in the Kalaloch Lodge library.
The exhibit will close at 10 a.m. Sunday.
Welch was an early trailblazer in the Olympics and a prominent Port Townsend businessman whose family had originally settled in Beaver.
■ The Forks Timber Museum in Forks will be open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. today and Saturday for visitors traveling through Forks on their way to Kalaloch.
The museum was built by the Forks High School carpentry class and by many area volunteers.
Set on 5 wooded acres, the exhibits at the museum tell the story of Northwest Olympic Peninsula logging.
Saturday
■ Gary Peterson will share stories of the Hoh River Valley at the Peak 6 Adventure Store on the Upper Hoh Road from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Topics will include the 1808 wreck of the Russian ship Nikolai, which brought the first non-Native woman to the Olympic Peninsula, and stories of Mick Dodge, star of the National Geographic Channel reality show “The Legend of Mick Dodge,” much of which is filmed on Peterson’s property.
Peterson is a fifth-generation native of the valley and descendant of Minnie Peterson, who ran horse packing trips into the high Olympics for 50 years.
He co-authored the books Women to Reckon With: Untamed Women of the Olympic Wilderness and High Divide: Minnie Peterson’s Olympic Mountain Adventures.
■ Two programs will be held Saturday at the Kalaloch Lodge library.
At 2 p.m., Steve Hauff will present a program about the U.S. Army’s Spruce Division, established to supply high-quality spruce needed for the production of aircraft during World War I.
At 4 p.m., Olympic National Park anthropologist Jacilee Wray will talk about her new book River Near the Sea: An Ethnohistory of the Queets River Valley.
The book begins with the Queets people and follows the influx of homesteaders in the late 1800s and the eventual acquisition of some homesteads for Olympic National Park.
Wray is the editor of Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are and co-authored From the Hands of a Weaver: Olympic Peninsula Basketry Through Time.
For more information or to schedule an oral history interview, phone the historical society at 360-385-1003.
