SEQUIM — Volunteers are putting the finishing touches on a suite of events scheduled for this weekend that will launch a yearlong celebration of Sequim’s 100th anniversary in 2013.
The festivities start today with a pancake breakfast scheduled to run from 7:30 a.m. to
1 p.m. at the Sequim Prairie Grange, 290 Macleay Road.
Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for children, and are available only at the door.
Aglazing Art Studio of Port Angeles will be on hand at the grange throughout the pancake breakfast to help launch a yearlong public art project involving commemorative tiles.
The cost is $10 to paint a 6-inch-by-6-inch tile, which the studio will glaze and fire.
The tiles will be incorporated into a public art display at the completion of the centennial year, and the goal is to have at least 1,000 of them.
At 6 p.m. tonight, doors will open for the Sequim Centennial Kick-Off Dinner at the Sequim Holiday Inn Express, 1441 E. Washington St.
Tickets for the dinner run at $55, which includes two drinks and commemorative centennial stemware, and are available at Sequim City Hall, 152 W. Cedar St.; Pacific Mist Books, 121 W. Washington St.; and the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce Visitor Information Center, 1192 E. Washington St.
Capacity for the dinner is between 100 and 110 people.
The centennial opening festivities wrap up Sunday with a Sequim City Band concert at 3 p.m. in the Sequim High School auditorium, 601 N. Sequim Ave.
All three events signal the start of a year’s worth of events, running till November 2013, that will celebrate the incorporation of the city of Sequim on Oct. 31, 1913, Mayor Ken Hays said.
The Sequim Centennial Committee has been working over the past two years organizing celebrations that honor Sequim’s history from tribal, pioneering and agricultural perspectives, Hays said.
Tonight’s dinner will serve as a taste of what the following year of centennial celebrations has in store, he said.
“I want [the dinner] to be all about Sequim,” Hays said.
The dinner will feature an appetizer, salad and prime rib main course, with an alternative available for those who don’t eat beef, with sides of garlic mashed potatoes and vegetables.
The meal will end with ice cream for dessert with a berry topping and also will feature wines and ciders.
Sequim’s Black Bear Diner will cater the event, Hays said.
Hays said the dinner will be as locally sourced as possible, and will include carrots from Nash’s Organic Produce and berries from Graysmarsh Farm, to celebrate Sequim’s agricultural heritage.
In addition to the meal, the event will feature a slide show of more than 300 historic images of Sequim and three speakers, who will give presentations on the city’s tribal agricultural and pioneer heritage, said Pat Johansen, one of the volunteer planners of the event.
Through the inclusion of locally sourced food and local historic information, Johansen and Hays said, the event has evolved from a mere dinner into a celebration of the people who made Sequim and the surrounding community what they are today.
“Cities are about people, not buildings or institutions,” Hays said.
For more information on this weekend’s festivities and for a full calendar of all centennial events, visit the city of Sequim’s centennial website at http://tinyurl.com/sequim100.
Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
