Triumph and Tragedy: 1919 Centralia Massacre performance

June 11, 2007

After graduating from high school over the weekend, three young women from the Twin Cities boarded a plane for a trip to Maryland, where they’ll compete Wednesday in the National History Day 2007 contest.

The girls—Abby Anderson, Marie Jenkins and Emily Weeks—treated a standing-room-only crowd of more than 50 last Wednesday afternoon at the Lewis County Historical Museum to a dry run of the performance they’ll be giving called “Triumph and Tragedy: 1919 Centralia Massacre.”

I enjoyed watching the talented young women bring controversial local history to life in a balanced performance that simultaneously educated and entertained. Before they started, history professor Jody Peterson of Centralia College presented the girls with a check for more than $1,500, money used by the college in the past to host the regional History Day competition, which now takes place at Green River Community College.

After the performance, the girls answered questions from the audience, including what they found most difficult in creating the skit. Finding a balance between two competing storylines—the American Legion’s version and that of the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World—they said, noting during the skit that, “Who shot first is open for debate.”

The route for a parade celebrating the first Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1919, went past the IWW headquarters twice, and four Legionnaires died in a gunfight that broke out. That evening, when lights flickered out at the jail, a mob grabbed IWW member Wesley Everest and hanged him from the old Mellen Street Bridge. The girls ended the skit with the comment, “History can be remembered without pointing the finger of blame.”

Whether the women rank high at the national contest, they will return home as winners. They successfully competed at regional and statewide contests. They performed in their own community to rave reviews. They researched their subject thoroughly, reviewing articles, books and microfilm at the Timberland Regional Library and digging through oral history interviews and photos at the Lewis County Historical Museum. They published a 23-page bibliography.

As I watched the girls perform, I recalled my own experience in the early 1970s, before the advent of National History Day, when as an eighth-grader I teamed with a friend to create a skit about Bent’s Fort, built in 1833 along the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail in southeast Colorado. We performed the roles of fort founders William and Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain, with a special appearance by frequent visitor Kit Carson, a legendary frontiersman, scout and former Union Army general. We also built a sugar cube replica of the old adobe fort, spray-painted brown. Our teacher, Ms. Schmeiser, asked if we would donate the replica and the tape recording to the local museum, so we did. I wonder if it’s still there.

As I listened, I heard Anderson say that she and Jenkins first developed a skit on the Centralia Massacre in Diane Pope’s seventh grade class at Centralia Middle School. At the time, Alison Burchett, who is Miss Lewis County, performed the role now held by Emily Weeks of Chehalis. Weeks, also a student of Pope’s, moved to Chehalis but maintained her friendship with Anderson and Jenkins. They built their set, wrote the script, created costumes, and practiced their 10-minute performance after school and on weekends.

The girls credited their former teacher as their inspiration.

“To say that I inspired them was overstating it,” said Pope, who watched the girls’ performance last week. “I’m thrilled with their achievement. I’m just glad that I had a little part of it in the beginning.”

As part of a middle school gifted and talented program, Anderson, Jenkins and Burchett had to complete a humanities course that included creating a National History Day project, Pope said.

“There’s no requirement but lots of kids keep doing it right on through high school,” she said. “They keep doing all that work on their own time.”

In 1993, Pope accompanied a group of five Centralia students to the national competition, where they performed a skit about the Whitman Massacre. Although they didn’t win, they enjoyed touring historic places near Washington, D.C.

She recalled trips to the Washington History Day contest when, whether they won or not, students on the trip home would start planning their projects for the next year.

“All the work resulted in something even if they didn’t win a prize,” she said. “They would always come away feeling really good about what they accomplished.”

Anderson, Jenkins and Weeks should be congratulated for creating history projects and competing statewide and nationally.

And kudos to teachers like Pope and Schmeiser who plant the seeds for a love of history. Sometimes they reap a harvest right away; other times it can take decades before that love of history sprouts—perhaps into a full-time profession.

Julie McDonald Zander is a personal historian and former journalist who lives in Toledo. She owns Chapters of Life, a company dedicated to preserving the past, one family’s story at a time. Her Web site is www.chaptersoflife.com She can be reached at memorybooks@chaptersoflife.com