Panning for local history gold at Darrington Ranger Station

By Adam M. Sowards

For The Daily Herald

DARRINGTON — A rhythm to the work quickly settled at the Darrington Ranger Station on a recent weekend.

Page turned.

“Got it.”

Page turned.

“Got it.”

The hum of activity filled the room, as volunteers preserved history in an assembly line fashion. Removing staples slowed them down. So did answering interview questions, Tom Thorleifson of Lake Stevens joked.

“It’s hard to not pause and read all of them,” said Jim Liming, of Lake Forest Park, who lived in Darrington as a boy.

“Interesting,” someone says, while another admonishes, “No reading!”

Time is pressing.

“The biggest risk we have is we start reading it while we’re trying to scan them because that slows us down,” said Fred Cruger, a volunteer from Granite Falls.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service’s Darrington Ranger District received word that a records strike team would arrive in June. Its task would be to sift through the historical records saved in boxes and filing cabinets and decide whether the files should be retained in Darrington or removed to a federal records center elsewhere.

Over several recent weekends, handfuls of volunteers gathered in a rectangular room in the back of the Darrington Ranger Station. The walls on one side exhibited small black-and-white photographs of the grounds taken decades ago when the trees were short. The other wall held large color images of nearby mountain peaks.

They are reminders of this place’s past and the land this office manages and protects.

Keeping history alive

At long tables, seven volunteers sat in front of computers and scanners that reached up like hovering arms. The volunteers were focused, pulling out files from boxes and laying out the pages beneath the scanner, which emitted three red laser lines to capture the contents: official correspondence and reports, letters, maps, photographs and more. It took just a moment.

Page after page, hour after hour, they are keeping history alive.

Federal agencies must follow records management procedures to ensure government records are kept appropriately and legally. The likely destination for files leaving Darrington would be a National Archives and Records Administration facility in Seattle.

In 2020, the NARA facility in Seattle was slated for sale, which would have relocated materials several states away. That decision has since been reversed, but the specter of losing access to local records hangs over the people who want to maintain easy access to historical Forest Service documents.

Even if the records are placed in the Seattle NARA facility, they are removed from the local community and the local forest offices. Local context might be lost. People interested in local history, as well as Forest Service employees who rely on historical records for research and management decisions, worried the strike team’s imminent arrival would jeopardize this local archive, an intertwined history of a community and ranger district.

With the threat of losing history hanging over their heads, local volunteers through the Darrington Historical Society pulled together this spring to save as many records as possible in digital form.

Erika Morris, of Darrington, has been the driving force behind the effort. Morris works as an information specialist for the ranger district and is also a member of the Darrington Historical Society.

Morris grew up spending time in the towns and forests along the Mountain Loop Highway. For three seasons early in her career, Morris worked at the Suiattle Guard Station, built in 1913. She loved when iconic figures from the area visited. She recognized the value of their stories about the guard station. When someone shared a book about the area, her fascination grew. She joined the historical society in her 30s, one of the youngest members of a historical society where founding members were still active.

“Somehow, I never could quit,” Morris said.

Morris hopes a website and virtual museum will make these records available to the public. But for now, time is of the essence. Morris and the other volunteers were scanning as many records as possible before the strike team arrived to potentially pack them away.

‘History that I can relate to’

In recent years, technology has improved to allow easier preservation. New scanners and software work fast. Volunteers can scan about 400 pages an hour. Typically working in pairs, one volunteer places multiple pages beneath the scanner arm, and the software recognizes each individual page. The other volunteer either clicks a computer mouse or presses a pedal beneath the table. The software can even flatten detected curves if they are scanning from an open book.

As the pages are scanned, the software interprets the words — a process called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. This process means the scanned images can be searched.

This is what makes the history come alive.

Cruger has worked with the Granite Falls History Museum for years, where he became familiar with the possibilities these technologies provided for the public to connect to history through digitization.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned for sure,” Cruger said in an email, “it’s that I have no idea what question is likely to be asked when someone comes into the museum.”

Having the ability to search for names or places or technologies makes retrieving the history easier than ever. Local history enthusiasts and organizations formed the League of Snohomish County Heritage Organizations decades ago to connect and support efforts to share history across the county. Lately, deploying technological tools for history in creative ways focused LOSCHO efforts.

Cruger explained this organization encourages standard practices for digitization, which makes historical records more easily accessible, something that increases foot traffic in local museums.

Cruger wanted to help the Darrington Ranger District have this same capacity. He’s helped for several days, scanning documents and being a voice of experience. While Cruger and Liming scanned Forest Service records about timber sales in the 1970s, another volunteer interrupted after finding a letter Liming wrote in 1978.

This coincidence underscores a common point: The volunteers have connections to this place and want to be sure the history is remembered.

“To me, the most interesting history is local history that I can relate to,” Liming said. “Stuff that either my parents or grandparents would have been involved with.”

Liming notes that it is easy to be anonymous in the city but not so in these small towns.

“In smaller communities like this,” he said, “people are not anonymous to one another and I think that local history is interesting to me because of that.”

‘So many things we can learn’

Malcolm Bates happily volunteered but confessed selfish motives, too. Bates published the book “Three Fingers: The Mountain, the Men and the Lookout” in 1987 and is working on a revised edition. He did not use any records in the Darrington Ranger District for the first edition but has already identified photographs and letters he will incorporate. Bates was excited when Morris discovered a letter of mild reprimand to longtime Darrington ranger Harold Engels, something of a legend here. Knowing even Engels got scolded delighted the volunteers.

The scanned documents will make discoveries like this simpler in the future. While volunteers bring their personal histories and projects to the table, Forest Service staff see additional things as important in preserving these records.

Paul Alford, the forest archaeologist and heritage program manager, makes heavy use of historical records in his work. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 mandates federal agencies consider what effects their activities will have on historic properties. Alford and the Forest Service are charged with making a “reasonable and good faith effort” to identify historic properties, such as tribal sites and railroad camps.

The sorts of historical records the volunteers are preserving help Alford locate things on the landscape. The historical record generally matters beyond simply complying with the law.

“It’s part of the identity of the agency,” Alford said, “and in this case, it’s also part of the identity of the community because they’re so tied in together.”

Tribal history also is interwoven in these records, which can help establish a paper trail often missing. Alford sees great value in history for practical reasons for his job, but also more broadly.

“For me, I can’t understand the idea of not wanting to look into the past and see what’s there and to understand where we’re coming from and who was there before us,” Alford said. “There are plenty of functional reasons, legal reasons, process reasons, so many things we can learn from it. But I just have a personal fascination with it as well.”

The district ranger, Greta Smith, appreciates history, too. She has been the ranger in Darrington for four years and seen a lot of change already.

“I can only imagine what has changed over the last 100,” she said.

Smith spends a lot of time thinking about recent history in her day-to-day management; however, she recognizes how many of the challenges the forest and community face have been present for decades.

“I don’t think we’re going to realize just how valuable this is until we need it,” Smith said about the historical society’s efforts to preserve the past. “I think it’s going to pay dividends down the road that we’re just not aware of yet.”

‘Once it’s gone’

On a lunch break, volunteers enjoyed hot dogs barbecuing outside in the sun beneath tall trees.

Sam Crager, who lives within walking distance of the ranger station and who is active with the historical society, was enjoying himself and reflected on what he had already seen.

“There’s a lot of stuff that goes into managing the forest,” Crager said. “It’s just all interesting.”

He knows it is possible no one will ever look at these things again. But maybe not.

“Down the road, you never know,” Crager said. “So it’s nice to have a record of these things, because there might be connections discovered down the road that nobody ever suspected.”

Thorliefson likened history to a photograph. You take a picture of one thing but later you see other things in it. These historical records show more than they intended.

“There could be some things that don’t seem important,” he said, but they could be. “There’s just clues all over. Everywhere. We don’t want to lose any.”

Scanning these records preserves the possibility of examining those clues with new eyes and questions.

“History provides the context for the present,” Crager said. “Without a knowledge of history, you really don’t know where you are.”

Crager is glad to take part in this effort.

“Once it’s gone, you can never reclaim it,” he said.

That is what has motivated these volunteers over more than 150 total hours and thousands of scanned documents.

The volunteers enjoy the work.

“It feels like we’re doing something that’s worthwhile,” Crager said.

And the Forest Service benefits. Smith is “very grateful” for the historical society for their work.

“I think because of them, we have a better understanding of our history, our files, and our story,” she said in an email.

Alford explained that digitizing the records not only keeps them available for local history enthusiasts and Forest Service personnel but also preserves them in case of some catastrophe, like a fire or volcanic eruption, that could strike the Darrington Ranger District office. A less-dramatic catastrophe would have been these files lost, but as the volunteers and staff note, any loss of history would have been its own kind of catastrophe.

Thanks to Morris and her friends and volunteers who responded, that crisis has been averted.

Adam M. Sowards is a freelance environmental writer and historian: https://adamsowards.net/contact; Twitter: @AdamMSowards.