0103, 2021

The 1910 Wellington Train Disaster

Washington Our Home
March 1, 2021
Disasters, Ghost Towns, Hikes, History, Railroad, Western Washington
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593

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Just after one o’clock in the morning, on a frigid, starless night in March 1910, more than a hundred souls aboard Great Northern Railway’s Spokane Local No. 25, a passenger train, and Fast Mail Train No. 27 slept tightly bundled in their cars. They’d been stuck near Wellington in King County, Washington, for almost a week…waiting as railroad crews attempted to clear the tracks of snow, which had been accumulating

0401, 2021

Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest

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Two weeks after Valentine’s Day, 2001, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the south sound region of Washington state near where the Nisqually River empties into Puget Sound. It was nearly 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the state legislature was in full swing. The violent tremors lasted nearly a minute, rocking the state capital of Olympia and the nearby cities of Lacey, Tumwater, Nisqually, DuPont, and Shelton. The shocks registered

0211, 2020

The Whitman Massacre

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Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were Christian missionaries who left their homes in upstate New York and traveled with another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding, to what was then called Oregon Country in 1836. Their mission? To “Christianize” Indians. In fact, Oregon wasn’t even a territory yet. The United States government didn’t have any programs in Oregon Country, which at the time consisted of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon,

0408, 2016

Alas, the UW reactor building is no more

Several months back, I blogged about the effort to save the historic nuclear reactor building on the UW Seattle campus. Sadly – despite its listing on the National Register of Historic Places – UW went ahead with the demolition of this beautifully brutalist building.

1711, 2015

Historic UW Nuclear Reactor Building in danger

Washington Our Home
November 17, 2015
History, Puget Sound, Western Washington
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1224

The Nuclear Reactor Building is an exceptional example of Brutalist design from the Mid-century Modern era and the ideals that drove the Modern movement. Designed by renowned architects of the time, the building’s design promotes technology and rejects the conventional academic architecture surrounding it. It is a completely unique structure, and represents a specific time and way of thinking in the history of the University, and the overarching history of