The state of Washington doesn’t really seem to care about its history. True, since it’s the west coast, there’s not much history to learn about. But what history is here is largely unexplained and uninterpreted.

When I travel, I generally focus upon history. It can be fairly recent or even prehistoric (which is a silly word), but my travels often involve or completely revolve around the historic. I’ve traveled around much of western Washington, diving into the history of Seattle and the passes over the Cascades. I’ve studied the natives, the white folk, the British, Spanish and, later, Americans who claimed this area as their own.

Overall, there is almost zero interpretation of any of this. Take my recent “discovery” of Fort Casey on Whidbey Island.

Back east, a fort this size and in this good of condition would have some explanation. There would be plaques, markers, tour guides and probably a gift shop (I guess it’s the price we pay). There wasn’t a single historical marker or sign explaining what any of this was.

As you walk from the parking lot to the fort itself there is a little bulletin board kind of sign with a very rudimentary map (xeroxed?) and maybe a few words about the fort (when it was built, etc). However, that’s it.

Learning the history of a place while you’re visiting the place is great! The old and ancient are given new life when you’re standing where those before us have stood. The artillery pieces at the fort were pretty spectacular. How far they could shoot, how they were loaded and how quickly they became obsolete would have meant much more if I hadn’t simply read it on a Wikipedia page.

All this begs the question: why? Why isn’t this site, and many others in this fine state, interpreted? Is it a financial thing? Is this a trade off for not having a state income tax? Maybe it is. Mostly, however, I think it’s a lack of interest stemming from the fact that most everybody here is new.

Many of the outlying communities, which have had the chance to foster a few generations of fairly stationary residents, have pretty nice historical societies. And while they’ve generally not gotten around to the interpretation of historic sites, at least there is a growing interest.

But Seattle and the more touristy parts around it (such as Fort Casey, I guess) suffer greatly from lack of roots. We are a very transient city made up of many self-focused people on their way to get more coffee. So few of us stop to think of what was here before us. Too many Seattleites fail to perceive that there even is an us – usually it’s just a “me.”

Since Fort Caseyis far enough away from the city to not be as influenced by this poisonous attitude, there’s probably a good chance that it’ll be interpreted at some point. But for Discovery Park and Magnuson Park (an army base with an old missile silo and a Navy base with ammunition bunkers, respectively) there’s probably no hope at all.

What little hope there is seems to be left to the individual. The “underground” of Seattle was nearly forgotten until one person took it upon himself to uncover it. Here, history must be tracked down, researched and then interpreted.

Back east, the basic story is told through historical markers and tour guides. From there, you can delve into the details. Here, it seems, even the basic story must be dug up – what to say of the details. We become the voices of the past and the tour guides to the very few who are interested enough to listen.

We had a really fun time on Sunday traveling around one of the islands just northwest of Seattle. I took a TON of pictures and well… let’s just get down to business.

Click on any of the pics to see a BUNCH more photos!

Or click here.

Nikki visited Seattle this past weekend and we all had a ball. We took her on a short tour of Seattle and the out lying areas. It was quite a bit of fun and we took pictures!

Check them out here.

Yesterday we braved the 14 degrees temperatures and visited the chilly town of Leavenworth, Washington. We’ve been there several times before, but not when it was Christmas time.

Along the way, we hit old road alignments and saw the same train in several places. I was pretty stoked.

You can check out all the pictures here.

Spencer, Washington was hardly ever a town. The name may have been around since the 1880s, but the Post Office was only there from 1911 to 1918. A hotel was also there at the time and probably lasted into the late 20s or early 30s.

Not much seems to be remembered about Spencer.

But for some reason, this lost ghost town (all buildings and traces of the place are gone), has captivated me. I’ve spend hours pouring over old maps, searching for references to it and trying my best to figure out not only what it was but exactly where it was.

Spencer is somewhere in Moses Coulee, a canyon along US Route 2, about 20 miles east of Waterville in central Washington. No rail service ever graced this town. There was never a service station (that we know of) or a place to grab a bite to eat. But there was a post office and a hotel.

Yesterday, we set about to find them.

We met up with Dave (a fellow roadie from the American Road Magazine forums) who is also fairly obsessed with Spencer. After a tour of Douglas County’s fine museum and a fairly fruitless attempt at finding out more about the town (nobody seems to remember this place at all!), we all head out to the site.

Calder, Sarah, Dave and I tramped across the sage brush, trying to follow a road that has completely disappeared. A slightly later alignment of the Sunset Highway/Yellowstone Trail/US 2 is very accessible and open to traffic, but this old segment where Spencer lived is completely gone. Even traces of the road were impossible to find.

Thankfully Dave had programmed the plot points that he got from a small bit of map work that I did into his GPS. We followed that, even though we were pretty convinced we found a site. It had some oddly placed rocks and an old tree limb that Calder found (there are no trees out here – so that was suspicious).

The site turned out to be something (but impossible to say what). Still, we headed north, staying about .2 miles east of Jameson Lake Road and about double that distance north of US 2.

Looking at the 1915 map, I tried to line up the telephone poles and thought that we should head farther north. We pushed on, moving past where we thought it was.

Calder and Dave found a bit of metal from a can and I scurried off to find Sarah who found a clearing with no sage brush in it. Sarah’s find turned out to probably just be a clearing (though why it was clear, I don’t know). However, Dave found the motherload and we rushed back to check it out.

Dave’s find proved to us that he had found the site. He picked up a bit of glazed ceramic China which read “HOTEL” on in. This was it. It had to be.

Around Dave’s discovery (which I stupidly neglected to photograph!!), we spread out and found bits of glass, more china, tea pot handles, cold cream jars, medicine bottles and other various man-made things.

As we moved north (the debris field seemed to spread north), Sarah found an object that gave us a date! She picked up a piece of metal and said “is this a license plate?” Sure enough it was! Way to go, Smartz!

She had found a plate from 1916. That’s impressive. What a lucky find! This was now definitely the place. We also found an insulator from a telephone wire, which proves that there was electricity here and that we had found not only the hotel, but the road (and probably the post office, which was right across the road from the hotel).

This made all the hours of research worth it. I can’t believe we actually discovered an old town site. It may seem like a trifling and silly matter to most, but for Dave and me (Sarah and Calder too – they grew to share my obsession, especially when we started to find stuff) this was a very good day.

After the find, Dave had to head back, so Sarah, Calder and I did some more exploring of the Moses Coulee area and visited Dry Falls.

As soon as I get the exact coordinates from Dave, I’ll post them. I don’t expect a rush of tourists to take a pilgrimage to the old Spencer site, but if they wanted to, now they can.

I’d like to make some sort of small marker to indicate what’s there. I’d also like to find some old photographs of Spencer. I’d be willing to bet that they exist, if only we knew of some historical society that could help us out with that….

You can check out all of my pictures here.

*Edit – One thing I neglected to mention was how Spencer got its name. Nobody really seems to know. The person who runs the Douglas County Historical Society did a project on place names in Douglas County, but failed to come up with anything for Spencer. According to her research, nobody named Spencer lived there or owned properly there.

However, I came across a P.K. Spencer who ran for two county offices in 1888. He lost the election for Prosecuting Attorney (receiving only one vote), but won the race for Joint Representative (253 to 207). This info can be found here.

Now, exactly who P.K. was and what happened to him is anybody’s guess. I’m not even sure that Spencer was named after him. But it’s the only lead we’ve come across.

Calder is visiting this week and part of that visit is checking out some fun parts of Washington. Today we hit the Snoqualmie Depot and a section of the Yellowstone Trail highway that I’ve never been on before.

It was raining most of the day, but bits of sunlight broke through right when we needed them. At Snoqualmie, we found some great old steam engines and rolling stock. I’ve seen it before, but it was new to Calder. I found a great calendar of narrow gauge railroads (which I wish I would have picked up) and got Smartz a pressed penny (she was at work).

After the depot, we headed up to Snoqualmie Pass via an old alignment of the Yellowstone Trail that’s now known as Denny Creek Road. Smartz and I tried it in April, but the snow was five or so feet all around us that we decided to wait.

We attempted it again over the summer, but turned around for some reason. If we would have continued on, we would have come across an amazingly set of switchbacks with views of the valley and both lanes of I-90. Denny Creek Road travels between the interstate lanes. Pretty nifty.

We reached the top and then turned around and did it again!

I was looking for one of two known Yellowstone Trail arrows in Washington state and on the way up, I couldn’t find it. However, on the way down – there it was, just after a newish bridge with a wooden floor.

Mighty fine day!

After I got back from the trip on Wednesday night, Ryan and I hung out and I talked up the fine little town of Index, Washington.

I talked about the river and how the mountains surround the entire town, the old cars and broken down houses. There’s a real world quaintness to Index. It’s not like other quaint towns, like Issaquah or Snoqualmie (or Lewisburg). It’s not a cute town, really. But it’s got history that isn’t sugar-coated in Forth of July parades and Victorian gingerbreading.

So anyway, we headed out to Index with the kids. They enjoyed it pretty well (there was a river and rocks to throw into it).

Have I mentioned how beautiful Index is?

You can check out the pictures. Amazing place.