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Education

"I love all the history there!" Quinn, age 12, Walla Walla

In the past decade, nearly 50,000 participants made use of Fort Walla Walla Museum's admission-free school tour program.

You can request a tour for your school by calling the Museum at (509) 525-7703 or emailing info@fortwallawallamuseum.org. To complete your booking, you will need to include the teacher(s) name(s); number of students; number of adult chaperones; school name, address, & phone number(s); grade level(s); whether you'd like your group to visit the Museum Store; an interest in visiting the Museum Store; and whether you plan to picnic at the Museum or in nearby Fort Walla Walla Park*. Include your first, second and third preferences for dates and times. Tours take approximately 90 minutes to complete. Many groups enjoy touring Whitman Mission National Historic Site the same day as their Fort Walla Walla Museum visit. A separate call to (509) 522-6357 must be made.

Admission-free docent-led school tours in 2012 are available through the generosity of Blue Mountain Community Foundation; Boise, Inc.;
J.L. Stubblefield Trust; Mary Garner Esary Trust, and
Pacific Power Foundation.

* The Rotary Shelter is available to rent through the City of Walla Walla Parks & Recreation Department at (509) 527-4257. If not occupied, it may be used on a first-come basis, although users may be asked to leave should a party with a reservation arrive.

The Museum is interested in making contact with school children five or six times through their grade-school years. our docent-led, admission-free school tours are but one of the ways we try. The Museum offers a pair of annual summer Kid Camps for kids ages 9-11 sponsored by Coffey Communications and the Yancy P. Winans Trust admistered by (Baker Boyer Bank).

The Museum also has a 'Fort Walla Walla Museum in the Classrooom" program in which staff or volunteers take programs into area schools.
Museum Director James Payne explains the finer points of Revolutionary War-era artifacts to Mr. Lux's Green Park School fifth grade social studies students in Walla Walla.

College-Level Opportunities at Fort Walla Walla Museum:

• Support regional heritage through your school's 'Community Service Day'
• Earn college-level course credit through independent studies or co-ops
• When available, Fort Walla Walla Museum is certified as a site where you can fill a work-study position
• Consider the Museum as a resource for your term papers
• Occasional paid and volunteer intern positions
• Enjoy the Museum's student-rate discounts
• Fort Walla Walla Museum's 'In the Classroom' program attempts to reach students 5-6 times during their school years.
• Docent/tour guide ~ lementary & Middle school kids relate very well to college students. Practical, 'hands-on' experience for those interested in education careers

Hiawatha Elementary School in Othello, Washington has been visiting the Museum through the admission-free school tour program "as long as anyone can remember," said 5th grade teacher Tamar Lundsen. Showing her students "real-life artifacts" and explaining 19th century conflicts and resolutions between Indian people and Euro-American settlers is "definitely worthwhile." Kids like it, too. Terrel, from Mary Wallace' class in Kahlotus, Washington said, "I really enjoyed the tour at Fort Walla Walla. I hope my mom says we can go again this summer." Museum surveys indicate that 86% of student visitors had never been to a museum before. 82% said they'd like to return with their families.

Children from Walla Walla's R-Kidz Early Childhood Education Center
enjoy their admission-free tour of the Museum.

Educators are encouraged to download and use the Teacher's Guide to the Museum here. More information can be found in A Visitor's Guide to Fort Walla Walla Museum.

Lewis & Clark in Wallah Wallah Country; follow the route of the expedition through what is now Walla Walla County.

Lewis & Clark fun for kids: download here.

A brief timeline of regional events.

RESEARCH TOOLS [these sites are not affiliated with Fort Walla Walla Museum and are offered as tools for users; they do not necessarily represent the views of Fort Walla Walla Museum]

Images of regional heritage can be found at Historic Walla Walla Region: vintage images and new photos by Joe Drazan.

Frazier Farmstead Museum maintains a "Pioneer Names Index" that may be useful in genealogical research.

Census Finder "Census records are among one of the best and most often utilized tools for genealogy research. Many censuses are recorded or transcribed online. Locating free census records online can present a challenge. With a bit of patience, you will find thousands of census links to free census transcriptions, census indexes and census images in our categorized directory. Start with the drop down census menus. They will take you to census records for the U.S., United Kingdom and Canada which have been categorized all the way down to the county level, enabling you to search for census data online quickly and easily."

Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) provides access to descriptions of primary sources in the Northwestern United States, including correspondence, diaries, or photographs. Digital reproductions of primary sources are available in some cases.

NWDA contains thousands of documents, called "finding aids", that describe the contents of archival collections. In most cases, reproductions of the collections themselves are not online, although in some cases the finding aids in NWDA will contain links to digital material.

Although collection guides vary from institution to institution, most guides (including those included in the NWDA database) contain the following elements:

Overview of NWDA Collection:

• This section of the collection guide includes contact information for the archives (repository) that holds the collection as well as general information about the collection, including the title, the collection number (used to identify it at each archives), the dates of the materials in the collection, the size of the collection (quantity), and a summary description of what the collection contains.

NWDA is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the NWDA website do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NWDA is funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission

Inland Northwest Memories "is a regional database of electronic versions of Inland Northwest historical documents, contributed by cultural institutions from around the region, from their own locations. The Inland Northwest is usually defined as eastern Washington, northern Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and western Montana. The database currently emphasizes documents from northeastern Washington and North Idaho, TINCAN's traditional service areas. It will expand in the future. It is an evolving project, and we encourage feedback. The web site was built and is maintained by the Inland Northwest Community Access Network (TINCAN)."

INMP is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Small Town Museums: Reflections on Community Life project is supported by Humanities Washington.

HistoryLink is "the first and largest encyclopedia of community history created expressly for the Internet. HistoryLink.org is an evolving online encyclopedia of state and local history in Washington state.

"HistoryLink.org provides a free, authoritative, and easily accessible history reference for the benefit of students, teachers, journalists, scholars, researchers, and the general public. With a few noted exceptions, all essays and features on this site are original works prepared exclusively for HistoryLink.org by staff, contract writers, volunteers, and consulting experts. The encyclopedia contains more than 4,000 essays as of 2006. It is constantly expanding, with new essays added every week."

History News Network, a site for teachers and students. "Among the many duties we assume are these: To expose politicians who misrepresent history. To point out bogus analogies. To deflate beguiling myths. To remind Americans of the irony of history. To put events in context. To remind us all of the complexity of history. Because we believe history is complicated our pages are open to people of all political persuasions. Left, right, center: all are welcome.

"Even those who profess utter indifference to history are beholden to it. History is inescapable. Who we are and how we react to events depends, to a great extent, on our past. As Eugene O'Neill has a character in Long Day's Journey into Night exclaim at a critical juncture, The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us."

A character in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun avers, The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center "This Web site is the online presence of the Oregon Trail Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization which exists to manage and develop the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City, Oregon. As part of our mission to educate the public, this site contains a library of historical resources on the Oregon Trail and the early period of settlement in the Pacific Northwest. General visitor information for the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and nearby historic sites is also available through this Web site."

Preservation Directory an online resource for historic preservation, building restoration and cultural resource management in the United States & Canada whose goal is to foster the preservation of historic buildings, historic downtowns and neighborhoods, cultural resources, and to promote heritage tourism by facilitating communication among historic preservation professionals and the general public.

Access Genealogy maintains a web site of information about Washington State Indian Tribes.

Suggested bibliography:

Ferndale School, stateline area of Washington/Oregon
with Docent 'Jo' Winn, back row at left

updated July 11, 2011