If you own old photos, letters or objects you think reveal a unique aspect of West End history, then Larry Burtness wants to hear from you.
After spending two years recording and archiving about 10,000 historical documents, the Northwest Community Museum Project manager is looking for even more artifacts to add to a unique historical collection that will be accessible entirely via the Internet in 2006.
“We are interested in looking at almost everything related to the history and culture of the northwest part of the Peninsula,” Burtness said.
“But we will be looking at items only until the first part of August.”
After that, Burtness and the rest of the Northwest Community Museum Project team will focus their energies on cataloguing the roughly 12,000 items they plan to have in digital format.
These already include thousands of photographs, letters, journals, artworks and tools that shed light on what life was like in the West End during the past 150 years and beyond.
Pioneer’s journals
Two of these artifacts are journals written by H.A. Smith.
In the 1870s, Smith sailed from San Francisco to Port Townsend and then to Neah Bay, where he stayed a year before homesteading on the Quillayute Prairie with his family.
“He wrote pretty extensively of daily life, making notes of how he occupied his time, including business transactions with people in the community,” Burtness said.
Thanks to Smith’s journals — whose contents are being transcribed for easy reading on the Internet — modern-day historians can corroborate the fact that white settlers carried out extensive trade with Quileute and Makah tribal members, Burtness said.
For more information, call Burtness at 360-274-9122.