PORT ANGELES — Amanda, Melia and Kidist Winters were among the schoolchildren who showed that Sunday’s celebration of Clallam County’s 150th birthday was more than a history lesson.
It was a challenging exercise in understanding family and community roots at the ground level.
With the helped of their great aunt, Violet Lucille Grall, 81, the home-schooled Winters girls — Amanda, 16, Kidist, 15, and Melia, 13 — put together reports on their family’s pioneer history at Deer Park, east of Port Angeles.
“There were a lot of stories that I had never heard before,” Amanda Winters said with a smile, explaining the family’s pioneer history on behalf of her sisters.
“It really gave us a good learning experience of how connected we are to our community.”
Grall later accepted territorial descendant certificates from Clallam County commissioners at a ceremony inside the courtroom of the old Clallam County Courthouse.
She represented one of more than 40 pioneer families which applied with the county, representing 279 descendants.
June Robinson, past Clallam County Historical Society president and Clallam history columnist for Peninsula Daily News, helped organize the recognitions.
County commissioners secretary Penny Thornton made the certificates given to those with ancestors who lived on or before Nov. 11, 1889, the date Clallam was declared a county following statehood.
Today’s sesquicentennial recognizes April 26, 1854, when Clallam County was carved out of Jefferson County by the Washington Territorial Legislature.
The Winters girls took first place and a U.S. Savings Bond for their family project, which was exhibited along with several other students’ outstanding work in the faux-marble lobby of the old courthouse.
They received their recognition inside the old courtroom, where a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 200 packed inside the dimly lighted chambers, a few left outside the door listening to a loudspeaker set up there.
At the descendants’ recognition ceremony, Bob Clark was escorted into the courtroom by certified lawman and County Commissioner Mike Chapman.
Clark carried a 15-plus-pound, French-made Pomeroy musket, complete with bayonet, making it more than six feet long.
The musket was one of 24 that President Lincoln gave to Clallam’s original settlers to defend themselves in a sometimes hostile territory.
Clark explained that those who were given the gun were required by the federal government to take the muskets once a year to the county commissioners for personal inspection of each weapon — to ensure it was in good, usable shape.
In a symbolic move Sunday, the current commissioners — Chapman, Mike Doherty and Steve Tharinger — gave the rifle their approval, even though Clark said it had been fired only once in his lifetime during a duck hunt.
“There was too much charge in it,” Clark said, which blew off a part of the musket.
Clark is a descendant of Elliot Cline, the founder of Dungeness and for whom Cline Spit is named.
