Archives

Borrowing from the title of Legacy Washington’s current exhibit, 1968 was “the year that rocked Washington.”

From the civil rights movement to Vietnam and to growing concerns about the environment, it was a turbulent era in our history. With a passion for these issues and many more, Dan Evans went to Miami in August 1968 to deliver the keynote address of the Republican National Convention, at which Richard Nixon accepted the party’s nomination for president.

Even if you do enjoy the occasional snow, we can probably all agree that it creates headaches for driving, scheduling, dealing with kids who stay home from school, keeping the driveway shoveled, and so forth. Perhaps this look at a few historical weather storms will help remind us that the current weather isn’t that bad.

Walla Walla flood, 1931

Willie Keil was an ambitious 19-year-old when his family decided to travel the Oregon Trail in 1855. Willie had dreamed of driving a wagon out west, so he learned and was anointed the lead driver of the group’s wagon train.

2019 brings the 70th anniversary of the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Association, which was founded as the Mary Mahoney Registered Nurses Club of Seattle. Mary Mahoney was one of the first African-American nurses in the United States. In recognition of Black History Month, Washington State Archives researcher Dr. Jewell Lorenz Dunn researched the historical records held at the Archives to show some history behind the trailblazers who founded the club.

Last week we watched a little history. This week we’ll listen.

The last car to travel the Alaskan Way Viaduct cruised into a cold, dry Seattle night around 10 p.m. Friday, January 11, 2019.

The two-level stretch of State Route 99 along coastal downtown has been an element of the city’s skyline since the early 1950s, but safety concerns have hastened its departure. The viaduct was damaged by the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, and has been deemed susceptible to future damage should another earthquake rock the structure.

We have many historically significant trees in Washington, and many State Archives records document the people and events related to the state's most historic trees. Although State Archives collections mainly consist of state and local government records, many archival collections also contain photographs.

Debbie Bahn, the Electronic Records Archivist at the Digital Archives, and Eastern Washington University graduate intern Whitney Wyngaert manned the table at EWU's John F.

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The Washington State Archives’ Digital Projects Archivists Maggie Cogswell and Mary Hammer led the way in completing a massive, 11-year project digitizing and cataloging photos of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission. This collection of 2,396 photographs shows work conducted on Washington state parks by the CCC from 1933 to 1938, and includes images of Moran, Lewis and Clark, Deception Pass, Millersylvania, Riverside, Rai