PORT TOWNSEND — The Jefferson County Historical Society may start making monthly presentations for the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners.
The partnership would happen as the result of an effort to fulfill objectives laid out in the county’s strategic plan, highlighting the cultural heritage and the diversity of Jefferson County, said County Administrator Mark McCauley at a commissioners meeting May 19.
Reaching out to the historical society to consider the possibility of meeting the objectives through a partnership struck Mark McCauley as a good idea, he said.
Mark McCauley reached out to Jefferson County Historical Society Executive Director (JCHS) Tara McCauley, visited the museum and learned about the historical resources, he said. The two explored the idea of a monthly presentation together, Mark McCauley said.
“The thinking is that we would start with one 10-minute presentation per month, focused on the resources that we have, that would help support learning about the culture and heritage and diversity of the county,” Tara McCauley said.
“We would feature one group of resources per month. We would start next month and run through December, and then I think we could see, has this felt useful? How might we want to evolve this at the end of the year?”
Agreements with the county are not yet formalized and the first presentation is not yet scheduled, but the presentations could start as early as June, Tara McCauley said.
The society, founded in 1879, 10 years before the founding of Washington state, has about 500,000 objects in their collection, Tara McCauley said.
“Really quite a large collection for an organization of our size,” she added.
The presentations would involve brief dives into the various resources the history organization has available, Tara McCauley said.
For example, Tara McCauley explained, JCHS has over 50,000 photos, 30,000 are searchable online, from any device.
“People can use any search term they want,” Tara McCauley said. “But we’ve also grouped photographs together by collection. We have an entire collection that is grouped by, for example, the DeLeo family, which is a family of Italian immigrants.”
JCHS has a Chinese and Chinese-American collection that has been grouped together already, Tara McCauley said. Another Italian immigrant family, the Sophie Family also has a collection, she said.
Another resource to be highlighted is JCHS’s public programs and their archive of program recordings, Tara McCauley said.
“Dr. Caroline Collins did a program with us last year,” Tara McCauley said. “She was the curator of a wonderful exhibit we had at the museum. It was called ‘Take Me to the Pacific,’ and it was about the history of a black mariners in the Pacific region.”
Mackenzie Grinnell, a Jamestown S’Klallam tribal member, gave a presentation on place making in 2021. Doug Chin, a historian of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in the Pacific Northwest, gave a presentation in 2022, Tara McCauley said.
Archived presentations can be found on JCHS’s Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/user112070940.
JCHS also has a collection of over 600 oral histories, Tara McCauley said. They are hosted on a SoundCloud page linked from the JCHS website, she added.
JCHS operates at three sites, Tara McCauley said — The Museum of Art + History, The Rothschild House and The Collections Building and Research Center.
The Museum of Art + History, 540 Water Street, is open Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. until December.
The Rothschild House, 418 Taylor Street, is open on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Sept. 13.
Admission to the Museum or the Rothschild House is free for members or students 17 years or younger, $9 for adults, $7 for seniors 65-plus, and $7 for members of the military. Purchasing admission to one site grants a visitor access to each site, if open. First Saturdays of the month are free. For more ways to access the museum for free, visit https://www.jchsmuseum.org/post/free-admission.
The Collections Building and Research Center, 13692 Airport Cutoff Rd, is open on Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
A $5 donation is recommended for non-members.
The Collections Building and Research Center is open to anyone interested in engaging historical research, by appointment throughout the week and for walk-ins on Fridays, Tara McCauley said.
A partnership with the county would align with JCHS’s efforts to expand access to their resources, Tara McCauley said.
“So much of the work that we’ve been doing in the last, say, 10 years is around creating access to those resources,” Tara McCauley said. “As a very small staff with pretty limited bandwidth, we really feel like one of the best places we can spend our energies is on making sure that the most people have the most access to the resources that we have. They can follow their own interests, their own curiosities, their own research questions and use our resources to do that.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com
