The Stories Beneath Our Streets | Two Rivers Heritage Museum - 📍 Washougal, WA

The Two Rivers Heritage Museum is a space lovingly crafted to protect local history. Exhibits like hand tools, textiles, baskets, and other artifacts tell the thousands-of-years’ story of the Camas-Washougal region. Julianne Lawrance, our tour guide, is the first Executive Director of the museum and is a passionate historian. Along with a large group of volunteers and dedicated board, Lawrence strives to keep the museum growing, ensuring future generations understand how the past shapes our present.

🗺️ Visit them at 2rhm.com | Facebook | Instagram  

👀 For pictures, video, and more, visit the episode page

🎉 This episode also celebrates: Downtown Camas Association & Pendleton Woolen Mills

⭐️ Thank you to this episode's sponsor: Johnson Bixby!  

Transcript

The Stories Beneath Our Streets | Two Rivers Heritage Museum - 📍 Washougal, WA

Adriana:  Today, I'm taking you on a tour quite literally of the Two Rivers Heritage Museum in Washougal. This museum catalogs history from before the settlers got here all the way through about the 1950s, 1960s here in southwest Washington, and particularly the history of Camas and Washougal.  It's right across the street from the Pendleton Woolen Mill. So if you're down there picking up a new blanket, make sure to stop in and say hi to Julianne Lawrence, the new Executive Director of the museum and a history buff for the ages.

I know you'll be able to hear her excitement and enthusiasm for our local history in our conversation today. Welcome inside and outside the Two Rivers Heritage Museum.

Welcome to I’m Into This Place, your deep dive into the local arts, culture, and heritage of Clark County. From fabulous new restaurants to quirky art installations to the historical sites you never even knew to look for, we’re inviting you along. Whether you're a Clark County connoisseur or just starting to get to know her, get ready to fall head over heels for this place we call home. I'm your host, Adriana Baer, and I'm into this place. Let's go.

Julianne, thank you for having me at the Two Rivers Heritage Museum. I'm so happy to be here.

Julianne: I’m so happy to have you here. 

Adriana: So you're the first ever executive director of this incredible museum.

Julianne: I am.

Adriana: Tell me a little bit about your background. What brought you to this position?

Julianne: Yeah. I grew up in Camas and, um, I've always been very interested in history. I, I got my undergrad in history and, um, I got my master's in education thinking I might teach history. I wound up in, in kindergarten because the littles are, were just where my heart was. And, uh, enjoyed that for 12 years in Camas. And then I was just ready for something new and right at that moment, in what felt like kismet, my mom, who was a retired teacher, reached out and said, we're trying to get some field trips going at the museum.

Would you be interested in helping out with that you're passionate about history and. I thought, oh, absolutely. So I, I came and helped with that and, and in that process learned that they were looking for their first paid director, as a way to build a legacy and protect that legacy really.

So,  it was really right place, right time for both myself and Two Rivers and, um, the rest is history.

Adriana: And tell me about the real kind of core mission of the museum.

Julianne:  So, two Rivers Heritage Museum is essentially the active branch of the Camas-Washougal Historical Society that was originally formed in 1978 to try to preserve a historic home, uh, the Van Fleet home, at Parker's Landing. While that home was sadly lost to an arsonist, their mission from then till now remains the same, which is to preserve and protect our local history.

Um, because it is important to, to understand, you know, uh, where we've come from and, and, uh, the things that make this area unique.

Adriana: So we are standing in the beginning of the museum mm-hmm. The front of the museum, but this place is much bigger than I even thought it was, so I'm so excited to have you show me through the rooms and then to all the cool stuff outside.

Julianne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, we've got 6,000 square feet of history here, so it's quite a bit. Um, and we'll make it through it all, and I'll even give you a little behind the scenes to the catacombs below, which are almost as big as the museum on top. Not as spooky as they sound, but, uh, pretty cool.

Let's head up our little ramp.

So we’ve got our, our, uh famous, uh, citizens of Camas and Washougal. And one that I always like to shout out is, uh, Michael Barrett, who's a NASA astronaut and a graduate of Camas High School. And, uh, he's always been a, a big supporter of, you know, the schools and education. And, um, I taught kindergarten there for a long time.

Adriana: Oh, cool.

Julianne: And, uh, during my last year, year there, he called us from the Space Station. Yeah, so he was on video floating around up there as he took questions from kids and it was just really amazing, like such a cool experience for them to have.

Adriana: That's so cool.

Julianne: Yeah.

Adriana: So all of the items that you have here are mostly donated by people's personal collections, right.

Julianne: Every single item was donated. Yeah. As a museum, we exist, um, because of the generous donations of, of time and artifacts and, and money, um, from the community who have felt it's important to preserve our history.

And this is Christine Crop. She, uh, was the secretary for a bunch of muckety mucks at the mill. And, um, she never married, never had kids, and she lived in an apartment above one of the Camas businesses. But she was really interested in investing. And so she would take the bus over to Portland and she invested in a little startup called Microsoft.

Adriana: Oh my gosh.

Julianne: Yeah, so, uh, when she passed away, she very generously left a lot of money to some local organizations, and we were one that was lucky enough to receive some support from her.

So she is one of the many reasons that we're able to exist. So this is. One of my favorite artifacts, and I think a, a lot of people's favorite artifacts. So churning butter is a pretty arduous task, right? You can probably imagine what a, a classic butter churn looks like. Takes a lot of, a lot of muscle power to churn that butter.

Well, uh, when folks were coming out on the Oregon Trail, they also would like some nice butter to, to go with their meal, but they're doing a lot of walking, a lot of work every day to, to move on that, that pretty arduous trail. And so, uh, some very ingenious person came up with this bad boy. So it sits on your wagon and, uh, you fill it up in the morning and then as you go on that bumpy road, 

Adriana: so this is like a, this is like a butter swing?

Julianne: Yes. Yeah. 

Adriana: It looks like a porch spring mechanism almost, but yeah. It's like a barrel that you would fill with milk and then swings back and forth and makes butter for while you walk. That's not bad. 

Julianne: Yeah, it feels pretty cool that we have an artifact that came out on the Oregon Trail and such a neat one too.

This is another favorite of mine.

<<music>>

Julianne: Well, that's our player piano. 

Adriana: Oh, how cool. This is so much better than YouTube.

Julianne: Isn't it? And then of course the family radio that you can all be gathered around. And this is actually my grandmother's that she grew up with. 

Adriana: Really? 

Julianne: Yeah. Yeah. There's a few artifacts belonging to my family that are in this museum.

Let's take a little detour down here to some behind the scenes. So this is our research room. We have some incredible volunteers who are very passionate about making sure we're cataloging individual family histories in ways that people can come and explore. So, you know, if you've got. A family that you want to learn some more about their, their history in Camas or Washougal, we've got a file on them.

Adriana: How cool is that? 

Julianne: Very cool. Yeah. And it's growing all the time as we, you know, find new articles, artifacts, photos, and as you can see, some are very large for families that were here for a very long time or, you know, had some really notable perhaps business that they owned for many years here and some are smaller.

But yeah, we, we. I like to be a, a, a resource for the community. And we have similar things about all the schools and parks and Wow. 

Adriana: Yeah. This is so organized. I'm really impressed. So we're going down yet another set of stairs into the basement,

Julianne: Much like the museum upstairs. Uh, the basement just keeps going and going even more than you thought it was going to. So you can see we've got some baskets out and these are our Native American artifacts, um, that were recently donated. And they were, uh, donated by descendants of the the Ough family, um, which are considered the founders of.

Washougal, um, Richard and Betsy Ough. Betsy was Native American and her given name was White Wing, and then Betsy was the English name that she sort of fashioned for herself. But their, their descendants have always, uh, appreciated that we are a place to help them preserve these artifacts that they had passed down.

And their family from generation to generation at present, the museum goes up to the 1950s is sort of our pause time in history just because of, as you can see, at a certain point you run out of storage space. But, uh, as history is a moving target, looking at expanding that soon and bringing it into the sixties and seventies and, and then after that, the eighties and nineties.

And so our museum has always been volunteer, built and run. Part of that has meant, you know, a learning process over the years of, they've been completely self-taught in what museum organization looks like and what museum display looks like. That's sort of the workshop area back there because again, volunteers.

So you know, if we can build it or fix it, we're gonna build it or fix it. So we have all those physical artifacts you've seen, but then we also have our photograph archives as well, which we have so many incredible photos and just all sorts of incredible images from towns and the surrounding areas and our photo team has, has worked with WSU to, uh, digitize a lot of them and make them searchable and available for the public, too.

And that's a, a goal of ours is to, to really put history in the hands of our community and help them to be able to connect with it in, in different ways. And I think photographs are such a good way to do that. 

Adriana: You have a link on your website so anyone can just go straight through to the WSU archive and you can search by all kinds of different things, towns and years, but also subject matter or what's in the photograph, you know, you can search by “abandoned buildings in Washougal from 1890” and up will come a couple of really interesting photographs.

If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should definitely take a look. I like that you have the museum organized by kinda subject area. 

Julianne: Yeah. 

Adriana: And not necessarily decade, right? Yeah. So we've got all the musical instruments now, all the kitchen stuff. Mm-hmm. And you can kind of see how things progressed over the years in one area. 

Julianne: Yeah. I think it's so helpful to have those things next to each other so you can see those different advances in kitchen technology and how that might've felt to, to upgrade. So the big industries in Camas and Washougal that really built these towns up are the three Ps. So we've got Pendleton, woolen mill, we've got the paper mill, and then we've got prunes and prune farming.

We were the prune capital of the world, believe it or not, and we're across the parking lot from Pendleton Woolen Mills, and it's, it's very much still an active woolen mill. And so we always encourage guests to go take a look and take the tour. It's, it's pretty incredible to watch them at work. This is our basket display and our, um, a big portion of our, our Native American Artifacts Collection.

As you can see, the beautiful different, um, designs all the different shapes and sizes, and they're for different purposes. Everything from little trinket baskets to berry picking baskets to baskets that might hold your. Your clothing, your personal effects sort of serve as a a closet of sorts. 

Adriana: Wow. These are so amazing.

Julianne: So this is our traveling loom. So it's meant to break apart and travel in a wagon from sort of farmhouse to farmhouse, homestead to homestead. And the idea is that the family would save scraps of, you know, yarn fabric, whatever throughout the year as they've made a lot of their own clothing and all those, uh, sorts of things.

And then the, the traveling weaver would weave them all together into one sort of scrap rug that, uh, that then they could use in their home.

Let's head outside.

So this is our carriage house, which is one of the additions we made to try to give more space, be able to have more displays and, and share a lot of these artifacts that we have. 

Adriana: Look at that. That's so cool. 

Julianne: You have a good eye. So that is the same model of carriage that Dr. Louisa Wright had. And she is really neat because she was a, a teacher and um, she decided she wanted to go into medicine and become a doctor, but she served all over Clark County as a doctor, back when this was Washington territory. So of course Clark County didn't exist yet, but uh, all over that, that geographic area, she'd go as high north as Ridgefield. And she served the people who were settling out here as well as the Native American peoples who were already living here.

And she rode her horse, you know, far and wide to serve people at their homes and then upgraded to this lovely buggy. But one Memorial Day she was hitching up her horse to the buggy and something happened. They, they think that, that her apron blew up in the wind and spooked the horse and it kicked her in the head and she died.

Adriana: Oh. 

Julianne: Yeah. It's, it's said though that her funeral was, was quite an occasion because everyone from miles around came as well as the, the river being lined with canoes because she was, uh, was such a, a good doctor to, to everyone around her. 

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Julianne: So this is the gathering place at Washuxwal which is my best pronunciation of the Chinookan word that was used to describe this place. And my understanding is that that word was meant to describe the sound of, of water over the rocks in the really rocky riverbed. It's just a model. It was, uh, designed and built by a local artist who's been trained in native carving styles and it is a model because it's, it's a lot smaller than a Cedar Plank house would've been. A, a real Cedar Plank house would've been at least two times wider and three times longer because it would house over a hundred people easily. 

Our volunteers and our, and our board felt very passionate that we needed to find a way to let people see and get a little bit more of an impression of what the Chinookan peoples who lived here, what, what the buildings they resided in might have looked like, the buildings they built, and get a, an idea of the scale of them, what impressive buildings they were and what incredible art would've been included on them. And, and then of course, the functionality, how that would've worked, you know, um, we look at it with our, our modern perspective and we say, you know, a home for a hundred people, what are you, you know, in this one building?

How would you even do that? But then getting to see this is how that would have functioned and the different ingenious portions of, of engineering that they used. For example, you, you might notice there are no, no chimneys. And we've got little tiles on the floor showing where fires would have been throughout the middle.

But they left a gap intentionally between the roof and the, the top of the walls so that the smoke would come up and be able to be utilized to preserve fish or meat. And then it would be pushed by the ceiling out those cracks on the sides. 

Adriana: So this is actually a model of a living space. 

Julianne: This is a living space for sure.

So on the, on the sides would have been a bunk bed is I think the easiest way to explain it to our modern imagination. But there would've been sleeping area on top that would've been much wider than this. And then storage area on the bottom. I think it just gives that feeling of awe that I, I am sure the first people who came to this area who were not familiar with Chinookan peoples and culture, and the first time they saw one of these, I mean, that must have been incredibly awe-inspiring and, and very impressive.

And then we've got our tools, our logging, and our blacksmiths, our forge, that actually came from Pendleton. All of the fourth graders in Washougal came through the museum last year. And, um, that's because we received a really generous donation that covered the cost of everything, including the buses, including having, uh, Sam Robinson, who's a member of the Chinook Council, come to their school and, and do a presentation on, on Chinook culture for them.

And also having the Columbia Play Project come and do a, a weaving project with them in our weaving room. That's great. Yeah.

And that's about it. 

Adriana: That's it. Only that. That's all.

Julianne: That's all. 

Adriana: Okay. So we've just come back inside. We spent a lot of time today talking about the past. 

Julianne: Yes. 

Adriana: I wanna talk a little bit about the future. What is your vision for Two Rivers and for local history, 

Julianne: My biggest vision is to keep us relevant and involved in the community.

My hope is that every child who goes to school in Camas and Washougal has been to the museum at least once on a field trip, that every community member, you know, it's one of the first things they recommend to out of town guests because it, it helps to give that full experience of where we've come from and, and where we are, and have us be involved in the community outside the walls of this museum at different events and celebrations, that we are there sharing how it relates to history and how the present and the future relates to our history and, and where we come from.

Adriana: So you've mentioned your core of volunteers a couple of times. Who are all these folks? 

Julianne: Oh, uh, who aren't they? Uh, we, we are so fortunate to have volunteers who come from all different backgrounds. Uh, some of them who grew up here and their parents grew up here and their grandparents grew up here, and they're, they're really rooted in this community and some who, who are new to this community, who just are passionate about history and, and wanting to find a way to get involved and make a difference.

We've got nonagenarians uh, who are volunteers here, and then we've got high school seniors who are working on their senior project and passionate about history and wanting to get involved and, and everywhere in between. But the, the core driver is always preserving our local history. 

Adriana: I think what's so important for all of us visitors to remember is that though the core of work is through volunteers, it takes funding and support to run something like this. Whether you're a much smaller version, like our neighbors at the North Clark Historical Museum. Or something that's extremely large and you know, sprawling, like your space. 

Julianne: Mm-hmm. 

Adriana: You're a nonprofit and you're doing a service for the community.

Julianne: Mm. 

Adriana: So one of the ways that people can support the museum is to just come and visit the museum. 

Julianne: Yeah. 

Adriana: It is very, very reasonable cost wise to come in here. I think if you're a kid, you can come in for $2. 

Julianne: Yeah. 

Adriana: So, uh, coming and paying the admission fee and coming in the doors, that's one way to support the museum.

But the other thing, and I think this is really important, is you can become a member of the museum. And that has a lot of benefits, both, uh, seen and unseen. 

Julianne: Yeah. We try to offer a lot to, you know, a lot of benefits to our members so that it feels really robust. And of course, as a member, you get free admission to the museum, um, all year long, as many times as you'd like to come.

You also get discounts in our gift shop, and then we're part of a reciprocal museum program called the Time Travelers. So that makes it possible for you to receive benefits at other museums that are also a part of that, whether that's free admission or discounts on their gift shop, or whatever the case may be.

But then we also have added some new perks as well, including a discount at a local brewery, Grains of Wrath, and a discount for a staycation at the Camas Hotel, which is a beautiful, historic boutique hotel and, and has a lot of history behind it right in the middle of downtown. It's important to us that we really find ways to show our members how grateful we are for them supporting us. 

Adriana: On the flip side, the thing that is also so important is that sustaining membership allows the museum to know where some of its funding is coming from year round. And that's true for every nonprofit that offers a membership. Sometimes it's not as obvious why a membership is so important, but for nonprofits membership is really that thing that says, okay, we've got a hundred members paying a hundred dollars, and that gives us x amount of money that we can rely on, uh, season after season or year after year. 

Julianne: Absolutely. And that helps us determine what programming we're able to offer in the coming year that helps us make sure that we can have the supplies that we need. There are costs that come with running a museum and, and preserving the artifacts with. The care that they deserve. 

Adriana: So as we come to the end of our time together today, I always ask my favorite question, which is “what place or person are you really into these days?” So while you're thinking about your answer to that question, I want to shout out our own weekly newsletter.

So every Tuesday we send out an email that shares. Even more behind the scenes content for this episode. It'll be photos and videos of all of the exhibits that we've walked past today and links to learn more about all of the exciting ways you can engage with the museum and the surrounding area In that newsletter, we also curate and give you a list of upcoming arts and culture events, and you can sign up for the newsletter by going to imintothisplace.com, or just click the link in the show notes.

All righty. What place or person are you really into these days?

Julianne: Oh gosh. It's hard to pick just one, but if there's one I really wanna shout out, it's the downtown Camaus Association's First Fridays. I think they are such an incredible way for community to come together. You get to experience so many different things.

Uh, the themes are always so fun and it's a way to make sure you're getting out and seeing the new businesses that are coming into town. You're connecting with new neighbors. It really brings that small town feeling to Camas that, that is so important to us all. And, um, it's been amazing to watch it grow over the years from just a, a small little event to now bursting at the seams where it feels like everyone in town is, is out and about and, and having a great time together.

Adriana: I also love the Camas First Fridays. I think they're so fun. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I absolutely loved touring around the museum. I can't wait to come back and bring my fourth grader and see all of the amazing artifacts that you have here again.

Julianne: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Adriana: And now let's hear from you. This is our Community Voices segment, where you call in to shout out your favorites in local arts, culture, and heritage. Community Voices is sponsored by Johnson Bixby, Vancouver's woman owned, women led financial planning and portfolio management firm helping you plan for and celebrate life's possibilities.

Advisory Services by Johnson Bixby, SEC registered. Securities through private client services member Finra, SIPC. 

Guest: Hey, I'm Kate White. I'm a voice actor and ICU nurse based here in Vancouver, Washington. And my shout out is for the really awesome playground at Marshall Park. My daughter is disabled, so we love how accessible everything is. There's always kids there, there's always something happening. We love the arch, we love the murals, we love the, all of the just fun statues and just the way it's done. So yeah. Um, hats off to Marshall Park for just being awesome. 

Adriana: We'd love to hear from you. What are your favorite spots in Clark County? Who really deserves a shout out? Give us a call and leave a message, or send us a voice note via email. All the details on how to do that are in the show notes.

I’m Into This Place is produced and edited by me, Adriana Baer. Engineering and mixing today by Tansy Aster Creative. This episode was recorded at the Two Rivers Heritage Museum. You can find out more about us and them at, imintothisplace.com. See you out there.