FORKS — Fannie Taylor, the postmistress of Mora, tells of daily interaction with settlers and the Quileute in the early-1900s trading post at the mouth of the Quileute River.
George Fernandez writes his autobiography about his life in Pysht, where Merrill & Ring operated a logging camp.
Lena Huelsdonk Fletcher, a daughter of the man known as the Iron Man of the Ho — one of the earliest settlers on the upper Ho River — reminisces about animals the family encountered in “Wilderness Pets.”‘
These and other historical treasures will go online this week during the Hickory Shirt/Heritage Days celebration.
Thursday event
The Northwest Olympic Peninsula Community Museum, a virtual museum project that’s been going on for more than three years, will go live with a reception and online Web site presentations at 5 p.m. Thursday at the Olympic Natural Resource Center’s Hemlock Forest Room, 1455 S. Forks Ave.
The focus of the virtual museum, at www.communitymuseum.org, is the West End of the Olympic Peninsula, the area west of Lake Crescent and north of Kalaloch, which is 35 miles south of Forks.
It can be accessed now, but lacks all the material that will be there later this week.
The Web site will contain from eight to 10 exhibits on the history and culture of the West End, said Larry Burtness, who was the project’s manager.
Some exhibits relate to homesteading.
Others describe the history and culture of tribes in the area.
Some of the exhibits are more contemporary, such as one dealing with the Hispanic population on the Peninsula.
The virtual museum also has about 12,000 digital images and documents in the archives, which can be searched for everything from memories of hewing out a farm from the Olympic wilderness to photos of the carvings, masks and paddles of native people.
Some of the material has never been published before.
