LB – events – Olympia Historical Society and Bigelow House Museum

Grand Parade of Progress by Robert Chamberlain

February 23, 2025

Looking Back’s theme for 2025 featured Thurston County area photographers, artists, and their subjects. In 2005, historian Lynn Erickson and artist Robert Chamberlain collaborated to produce a series of watercolors called Sylvester’s Window. This watercolor (cropped from the original) shows the Grand Parade of Progress in 1950, celebrating Olympia’s Centennial. The artist whimsically included himself as a young man chatting with Margaret McKenny by the grandstand.

Courtesy Olympia Historical Society and Bigelow House Museum (cropped image from Sylvester’s Window project)

Text © Deborah Ross and The Olympian 2025

End of Oregon Trail monument dedication in 1913

May 28, 2023

Throughout 2023 the Sunday Olympian’s Looking Back theme was origins of area place names. Old Oregon Trail Road descends from near the south end of Water Street to the waterfront below I-5. Before I-5 was built, this road was called View Place. The name was changed in 1983 to recognize that this road was part of the northern segment of the Oregon Trail in Washington Territory. Shown here is the dedication of the End of the Oregon Trail marker in Sylvester Park in 1913.

Courtesy State Capital Museum collection, Washington State Historical Society, catalog 2012.0.259

Text © Deborah Ross and The Olympian 2023

Women’s Marathon Trials in 1984

January 29, 2023

In 2023 the Sunday Olympian’s theme for its Looking Back feature was the origins of area place names. In 1970, a park was created on Capitol Lake’s western shore by placing fill material next to an existing railroad berm in the north basin of the lake. The park earned its current name, Marathon Park, when the City of Olympia won the right to host the U.S. time trials for the first Women’s Olympic Marathon, in 1984. The marathon route for the trials began and ended on Mottman Hill, above the site of the park.

1984 photo, Olympian archives

Text © Deborah Ross and The Olympian 2023

Bernice Sapp the National American Woman Suffrage Convention in 1909.

December 18, 2022

Washington State and Olympia were in the forefront of the push for female suffrage in our state and nationally. Pictured here is prominent Olympian Bernice Sapp, while she was attending the National American Woman Suffrage Convention in 1909. Held in Seattle simultaneously with the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, it was a major event in the campaign for successful ratification of permanent voting rights for most Washington women in 1910, ten years before the national 19^th amendment.

1909 photograph, Courtesy State Capital Museum collection, Washington State Historical Society, catalog C1961.18.29

Old State Capitol Annex groundbreaking 1902

October 16, 2022

In 1901, Washington State purchased the Thurston County Courthouse, adjacent to Sylvester Park, to serve as the state’s Legislative Building. An annex to the original building was built to accommodate state government functions. This photograph from around 1902 shows the groundbreaking for the annex. Governor John R. Rogers is in front, wielding a ceremonial shovel. The building is now the office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Photo 1902, Courtesy State Capital Museum collection, Washington State Historical Society, catalog C1958.181x.1.

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