We would like to welcome Kaitlyn as the Museum’s new Visitor Services Assistant. She began working at the museum as a collections volunteer, and is excited about her new role. She enjoys welcoming visitors into the museum, and providing them with information about Snoqualmie Valley and its history.

Kaitlyn has a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Washington, and is passionate about how local histories and cultures shape present day communities. She has six years of professional experience in the education field, and values the importance of museums in providing engaging educational opportunities for all ages. She is happy to be a part of the hard working team at Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum.

Kaitlyn will be staffing the Museum Saturdays and Sundays, 1pm to 5pm allowing the Museum to increase its open hours to four days a week through the end of December! She is also helping us increase volunteer accessibility to the Museum by working with collections volunteers on her days here.

Join us for our Annual meeting on Sunday, November 12, 2023 at 1pm! This year it will be held in the Northwest Railway Museum’s Train Shed Exhibit Hall at 9320 Stone Quarry Rd in Snoqualmie.

In addition to board elections, this year’s meeting will feature a series of talks on Trains, Planes and Boats in the Snoqualmie Valley!

Strategic Plan Update

Additionally, there will be a brief Strategic Plan update. The Museum has gone through several eras: its founding period with Ada Hill with the Museum in the school, the founding of the Historical Society moved into its first home and then its current location, and our most recent era with many members serving for the last 30 years. We knew we were in a transition period a few years ago, and the board began laying a foundation for a new generation to take over the Museum. As part of this transition, plans were created to recruit new voices to the board and to begin creating a Strategic Plan to guide the changes that would need to come.

This spring, the Museum began creating that plan with assistance from Glick Davis & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in nonprofit management. This summer work included:

• A review of key organizational documents, including financial, directional, policy, and program.
• Personal interviews conducted with 8 board members, 1 board emeritus, and the sole staff member
• A 20-minute, 33-question community survey completed by over 350 valley residents
• A 90-minute focus group with other local museums, many of which seek to expand existing relationships with SVHM to partner with, including Tolt, Duvall, and Fall City historical societies, NW Railway Museum, PSE Hydroelectric Museum, Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, and 4Culture,
• 4 benchmarking interviews with other local historical museums + 4 document reviews of other local historical museums
• Facilitated discussions with the Strategic Planning Committee and Board of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society.

Additional partner meetings are underway this fall, with government leaders from the Snoqualmie Tribe, the cities of Snoqualmie and North Bend, and the Si View Parks District before the final plan is created.

Key Takeaways so far include:

The Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum has been small and insufficiently resourced for decades.  Its physical capacity is too small for growth/displays, and it stands a greater risk of collection loss from fire, climate control, moisture, and other factors than a more modern facility with safeguards and protections (including climate control vault space).

There is significant interest, however, in growth toward a vision that addresses and, to a large extent, satisfies stakeholder interest and, indeed, pent-up demand for the many elements included in the Plan.  This interest has been evident in the responses to a community survey and at a focus group participated in by 19 potential partners that have collection storage/interpretive needs and who are desiring a coordinated approach to strengthen all – Snoqualmie Tribe, other historical societies, topically focused museums, Mountains-to-Sound Greenway, along with discussions with current and past Board and staff members.

The Museum holds many Tribal artifacts.  Ethically and practically, developing a stronger working partnership with the Snoqualmie Tribe is important.

The demographics of Snoqualmie/North Bend/Fall City mean that by partnering with the adjacent communities of Duvall and Carnation/Tolt and unincorporated areas, the project has the potential for approximately 7 times the population base.

The Draft Plan envisions and lays out an initial approach for:

• Growing Museum capacity to enable the resources for future growth
• A target annual operating budget in the $400,000 range with a small number of full-time and part-time paid professional staff, by 2029
• Five phases of planning and implementation to achieve these goals, with the immediate next phase allowing the opportunity to refine the vision based on a realistic assessment of SVHS capacity and make a well-informed decision as to whether to launch a full-scale campaign.
• A capital facility in the 10,000 square foot range and a capital cost of up to $10M. 
• A framework for interpretive and operational plans for post 2028

adapted from a 1992 article by David Battey

The Snoqualmie Tree Farm is 90,000 acres, which is nearly twice the size of Seattle and stretches from Snoqualmie Falls nearly 25 miles north into Snohomish County and nearly as far east from Duvall and Carnation.

Weyerhaeuser owned and operated the tree farm, improved the gravel roads, set up power and phone lines, and provided amenities such as trails and community picnic areas. In March 2003, a $185 million deal was signed to the Boston-based Hancock Timber Resource Group to control an area of forest long coveted by Northwest conservationists.

In 2004, King County agreed to acquire the development rights of the Snoqualmie tree farm from Hancock Timber Resource Group for $22 million through a deal made by the Cascade Land Conservancy. Hancock, which bought the land from Weyerhaeuser Co. of Federal Way in March 2003, maintained ownership and logging rights to the land, but any development is controlled by the county. The transaction is expected to close in late 2009. In 2015 Hancock sold the land to Campbell Global. In 2022, the Snoqualmie Tribe purchased 12,000 acres of the Snoqualmie Tree Farm.

When sold, the Weyerhaeuser presence so strong in the economic vitality of King County since 1900 was dramatically diminished.  But we need ask ourselves an important question.  Why wasn’t this highly developable land broken up and sold decades before, as were all other large private landholdings in King County?

In most early Puget Sound area saw milling, the timber, or “stumpage” was purchased from the owner of the land — which usually was neither the mill that processed the logs nor the woods operation that harvested them.  Under these circumstances it seemed logical financially to cut just the prime timber, and leave any re-forestation up to nature.  Nature was often slow and usually more interested in alder, cottonwood and brush than prime conifers.

When a company did own the land they logged they almost always sold it off as inexpensive “stump farms” soon after it was cut.  In fact, some logged-off land was not considered worth paying taxes on — and was allowed to revert back to the state.  This problem was so severe that Washington State created a special department to clean up such lands and find purchasers for the property.

But the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company (later Weyerhaeuser) adopted a unique approach.  The Company, which owned almost all of the lands it logged, decided just eleven years after incorporation and eight years after cutting their first log, that selling off so many acres of prime timber growing property was not good long-term policy.

Origins of the Snoqualmie Tree Farm

The acres of forest lands owned by the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company were a legacy of the days of the pioneer railroads, when the United States government gave away land in alternating sections as an incentive to railroad expansion.

The Weyerhaeuser family purchased their holdings in the Valley from the Northern Pacific Railroad in January of 1900.  Hindsight tells us that this was a good buy – but the history of forest fires, both natural and human generated, made this, in fact, a risky investment in 1900.  Just the wrong combination of weather and luck could have turned most of Western Washington into a landscape of smoking snags.  At the turn of the century there were few provisions for fighting forest fires.  Unless they threatened a town, fires often simply burned themselves out without human intervention.

These new Weyerhaeuser holdings were, furthermore, checkerboarded with lands held by the Rockefeller family.  This made access to the timber almost impossible, since you could not get to adjacent sections without trespassing.  Your lands just touched at the alternate section corners.

The Grandin-Coast Lumber Company was formed in 1906, with heavy investment by the Fisher family (with interests in Fisher’s flour and lumber operations) and their business associates.  Grandin-Coast immediately purchased the Rockefeller holdings that alternated with the Weyerhaeuser land.  With two lumber oriented families involved it is surprising that it took until 1914 for the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company to be incorporated.  Stock in this company was split roughly 1/3 Fisher and associates and 2/3 Weyerhaeuser, based on the percentage of land owned by each group.  The new mill became operational on November 25, 1917 — in time to provide significant critical resources for WWI.  In fact, straight, clear, light but strong Sitka spuce from logs like the one pictured on page 1 of this newsletter, was specified as a strategic war material —required to build airplanes.

As noted, it was unusual for the logging/milling operators to own their own timberland, or to keep it after logging.  So it was very innovative back in 1925, when Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company management made an unusual public statement.  It read, “Reforestation of the logged off lands of the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company, maintaining a perpetual stand of growing timber on all areas more suitable for this purpose than for agriculture, has been adopted as one of the progressive measures of this company.”  In fact, the company took this policy so seriously that they began purchasing logged-off lands that were good tree growing areas and contiguous with their property, including acreage from Weyerhaeuser and the State of Washington.

As the science of Forestry progressed, so did the commitment of the company.  The 1925 statement relied on standard practices of the time to re-forest.  A few solitary seed trees were left standing on logged-off land, and seeds were scattered by hand.  Later re-forestation practices depended on growing seedling trees and hand transplanting them onto the logged-off area.  A seedling nursery was started at Snoqualmie Falls in 1938.  The first tree-farm plantings were in September of 1942, and the Snoqualmie Falls Tree Farm was given certification (the sixth in the nation) in 1943.

This perpetual yield philosophy has resulted in ongoing land stewardship programs that bring us the thousands of acres of vigorous second and third-growth timber that cover the Snoqualmie Tree Farm today.

For many decades, our museum made do with little to no collections budget, but are trying to change that and improve that care by bring our collection care practices up to museum best practice standards. To do this, it means rehousing much of our collection. We would like to make sure both that our collection is properly housed in the appropriate archival material but also housed in a way that as the museum grows, the collection can be safely and effectively moved in the future. We have already begun this process but need additional funding to continue.

Our collection started in 1939 and was housed in the local school until the 1960s when the historical society was formed to take it over. Since the late 1970s the Museum has been in a converted 1949 house and an out building herein referred to as the Farm Shed.

When we hired our current Assistant Director in 2006, we prioritized gaining intellectual control over the collection and improved collections storage.  In 2008, the Museum had a General Conservation Needs Assessment by Dana Senge and have been working on recommendations from that report since. This has been done on a multipronged approach: We digitized, cataloged and rehoused our most utilized photographic collections to make them more accessible to the public. We digitized our catalog system and we have currently substantially completed an 8-year full inventory of our collection.  We purchased supplies and rehoused a substantial part of the Snoqualmie Valley Record newspaper negative collection of over 100,000 images through funding from 4Culture. We purchased supplies and rehoused the majority of our glass and pottery collection through funding from the Snoqualmie Tribe and moved it a different storage location to allow for more climate-controlled storage for more sensitive items. We purchased supplies and rehoused the majority of our archive collections through funding from our general budget and 4Culture.

We recently received funding to continue this work through a Collections Care Grant from 4Culture to purchase supplies to rehouse our schools, merchandising, and organizations collections; additional supplies to house incoming photograph and archive materials; muslin covers for some of our most venerable historic clothing pieces and supplies to begin rehousing our library collections. At the same time we are making building repairs through a grant from the Snoqualmie Tribe and support from the City of North Bend to help preserve the climate of the collection.

Let me introduce you to Kay Miniver. I’m sure that name is vaguely familiar. You probably know her better as Mrs. Miniver, the unassuming British housewife in the 1942 movie Mrs. Miniver. The character of Mrs. Miniver was so well-written, so believable, that it was thought she and her family lived in a small village near London. She, in fact, was fictional, the creation of the brilliant English writer Jan Struther.

Mrs. Miniver remains immensely popular largely because she had a gift for expressing profound thoughts simply. For example, Mrs. Miniver on rear-view mirrors: “She wondered why it had never occurred to her before that you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small, clear image of the past.”

I like to think that Mrs. Miniver sat on the board of directors of the fictional museum in her local community. Her razor-sharp insight explains exactly why museums exist. Museums work tirelessly to keep the past clearly in focus, always at the ready for that moment you glance back before forging ahead into the future.

The future of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum has become the primary topic of discussion at the Museum’s board meetings. Although ironic for an organization devoted to the past, it is the future of the Museum that is drawing the board’s full attention. The board intends to plot a course that will successfully guide the Museum for the next ten years and beyond, to ensure that the Museum continues to help the Snoqualmie Valley navigate the future.

Over the next year, the board will focus on defining and refining exactly what the Museum is now and will be ten years; what kind of building and infrastructure it will have; how its collection will be grown, preserved, protected, and presented; and, most importantly, how it will serve the community.

We, on the board, are often asked by friends, community leaders, businesses, and schools, “What can I do to help the Museum?” We sincerely appreciate hearing that question! As we plan the future of the Museum will be carefully crafting a response to that question. We will be able to respond precisely with the best way each of you can help the Museum.

Your participation in our planning process is welcome and your input welcome!  We’ll create a process for gathering your thoughts as part of our plan.

For now, please take a look at the Museum in your rear-view mirror the next time you drive down Bendigo Blvd. The building reflected in your mirror is unceasingly preserving Snoqualmie Valley’s past so that we all can successfully navigate our community’s future.

-Kevin Burrows, Board President

Bylaws Update

Since the Bylaws of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society were first drafted in 1960, they have been amended 8 times, most recently in November 2021. On January 1, 2022, the new Washington Nonprofit Corporation Act went into effect, necessitating the replacement of our current of bylaws. This Act was an effort to modernize and clarify the law that governs nonprofit organizations like the Museum.

Over the winter, a board Bylaw Review Committee was formed, consisting of secretary Beth Burrows, board member Steven Moses, and chaired by vice president Emily Lee. The committee outlined priorities for this review process, including preservation of existing language whenever possible, clarity and precision of language, and a format that was well-organized for ease of use. Most changes are necessitated by the new Act, as codified in Chapter 24.03A RCW. The board also used this opportunity to formalize and methodize practices that have evolved organically over the years and are working well but were not described in our bylaws.

Key changes made to the bylaws include:

· Moving from two membership meetings per year to a single membership meeting each November (2d: Annual Meeting), as has been practice in recent years and is adequate

· Election of officers moves from the annual membership meeting to the annual board meeting immediately following. This allows the board to elect officers based on who has actually been elected to serve as trustees for the following year (4b: Election and Term of Office)

· Transitioning the nominating committee to a standing committee to allow for year-round cultivation of potential new board members (3di: Nominations and 3ui3: Nominating Committee)

· Creation of a standing staffing committee to formalize the process by which the board of trustees hire employees of the museum, conduct performance reviews, and review job descriptions (3ui2: Staffing Committee)

· Language to describe under what circumstances a remote meeting may be held, as required by the new Act (2l: Remote Meetings)

· Language to allow notice for meetings to be sent electronically, as well as new parameters for such notice as described in the new Act (2g: Notice of Meetings and 3i: Notice)

· Relocating language that was previously part of the bylaws to more appropriate locations in the policy documents of the museum, since as our Collections Policy or Staff Job Descriptions

Please find the purposed Bylaws for approval at the November 20, 2022 Annual Meeting.

This quilt, object id 517.001, in our collection represents many in the community at the time. Created in 1939 in honor of Snoqualmie School Superintendent Richard Jacobs Schusman (he preferred to be addressed as R. J.) and presented upon his retirement.  This quilt was created by the Parent Teacher’s association of the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company mill town of Snoqualmie Falls Washington (1916-1958) and contains almost 600 embroidered signatures of community members — both adults and children.  Mr. Schusman was highly respected in the community and given credit for stopping a polio outbreak in the Snoqualmie schools in 1932 by convincing King County health officials that the schools must be closed and the children of the community placed in quarantine. Today there is a street named after him next to Mount Si High School.