Olympia Time

Captured Current

August 15, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

When you walk into Tumwater Falls Park, the Olympia Tumwater Foundation office is on your left and the WDFW hatchery facility on your right, directly ahead of you is the uppermost falls in the park. Google Maps marks it as a waterfall. Of course it does. Any water falling over a ledge looks like a waterfall, and this one photographs like one too.

It isn’t one. What you’re looking at is a dam.

The dam creates the waterfall, so in a narrow sense you’re not wrong to see falling water and call it that. But the structure underneath the water is not a natural feature. It was built, on purpose, by a company that needed it, and it’s worth remembering that before you remember anything else about this park.

The dam went up starting in July 1900, when the Olympia Light & Power Company began work on the upper falls under engineer A.J. Gillis. The goal, in the language of the time, was to “harness the falls” for a bigger hydroelectric operation, replacing an older industrial setup on the middle falls that had produced something like 400 horsepower. The new dam and its flume cost around $13,000, real money in 1900, and by October the company had built stone walls and a flume ten feet square, a wooden pipe carrying three tons of water per foot across 700 feet to the powerhouse. That first structure raised the water level four to six feet above the natural bedrock, enough to back up a slack water pool for roughly a mile upstream. In 1903 the west wing got reinforced in concrete and masonry, built specifically to survive the river’s flood stages.

When the dam reached its full and current height, it inundated flat land that is now part of the Brewery Complex, but was then called the “Chambers Place.”

Then in 1905 things got contentious. The Olympia Brewing Company and the power company both had founding claims to the Deschutes, and a legal fight broke out over who actually controlled its flow. The brewery needed water too, and the power company was starting to realize that its dry-summer turbine problem wasn’t going away on its own.

That fight is old news, but you can still feel its outcome every time you step into the river in July.

Here’s how far the dam’s reach actually extends today. The pool it creates sits at roughly 85 feet above sea level, and the dam itself only accounts for four to six feet of that artificial rise over the natural bedrock lip.

My back-of-the-napkin math says the reason its effect travels so far upstream has nothing to do with the dam’s height and everything to do with the valley above it. Between the dam and Pioneer Park, the river drops only three to four feet per mile, remarkably flat for a stream that’s about to plunge 82 feet through a gorge. A gentle gradient means a small impoundment backs up a long way, and the standard backwater math for this stretch puts the slack water influence at roughly 0.8 to 1.2 miles upstream of the dam.

Walk that distance and you pass through three distinct stretches. From the dam to about 0.3 miles up, past the old brewery complex and under the E Street and I-5 bridges, the current in summer is close to nonexistent, more pond than river, narrow and deep and still. From 0.3 to 0.8 miles, along the lower edge of the golf course, it’s still noticeably slower than a free-flowing river, the kind of water where you drift instead of ride. Past that, from 0.8 to 1.2 miles, the backwater curve finally tapers off, the water gets shallow again, gravel bars reappear, and you start to feel actual current, riffles instead of glass.

This matters most in summer, which is exactly when people are in the water. The Deschutes’ natural flow drops during peak tubing season, low enough that the dam’s slack water effect dominates the entire lower mile of the run. Instead of a current carrying you toward the takeout, you get what amounts to a long bathtub, and tubers spend the last 4,000 feet or so paddling and pushing themselves along by hand. The dam that most people don’t know is there is the reason the last leg of their float feels like work.

The 1905 fight over water didn’t stay a courtroom skirmish. The power company’s problem was simple: the river ran low every summer, right when demand for electricity was climbing, and its solution was to treat Lake Lawrence, up in the watershed, as a kind of savings account. The plan called for a canal a mile and a quarter long, dug to divert winter floodwater into the lake, dammed at its outlet to hold that water back, then metered out over the summer to keep the Tumwater powerhouse running. It required flooding land the company didn’t own and diverting water the brewery believed it had rights to, so the fight dragged through the courts for years, what one account called a monkey wrench in the gears of the whole project. To get the land, the power company pursued eminent domain, arguing in court that because it supplied both electricity and streetcar service to the growing city of Olympia, it had the legal standing to condemn private and public land in the public interest. The argument worked. Lake Lawrence fell under company control, a 25-foot concrete dam rose at its outlet, and the diversion canal got finished. The following summer, with its water supply secured, the company rebuilt the Tumwater Falls dam itself, adding four feet of height and flooding another 30 acres of condemned land along the way. By 1914 the company had what it wanted: a stable, year-round power supply for a city growing at twice its historical rate.

It didn’t get to enjoy that win for long. In 1919, Puget Sound Power & Light bought Olympia Light & Power outright, and as regional transmission grids spread across the Pacific Northwest, a small local operation like the one at Tumwater Falls stopped making much sense. Generation was phased out gradually over the following years. The physical evidence held on longer than the business did. It wasn’t until 1962 that crews finally dismantled the stone powerhouse and the penstock below the falls, clearing the lower river corridor for what came next: the Olympia Tumwater Foundation’s Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls, opened in 1962 on the site of the old plant.

The power company’s old foe for control of the river, the Olympia Brewing Company, ended up owning the old dam site a few decades after the Puget Power sale.

Notice what got removed in that demolition and what didn’t. The powerhouse and the penstock, the parts of the complex that unmistakably read as industrial machinery, came down. The dam, the part that produces a waterfall people like to photograph, stayed exactly where it was. Whether or not that was the intent, the 1962 clearing erased the site’s industrial past and preserved its scenic present in one move.

And here’s a theory worth taking seriously: that clearing is probably what started the Deschutes’ recreational floating culture in the first place. The newspaper record doesn’t show organized river floating before the park existed. It shows up within less than a decade of Brewery Park opening, when a group called the Rough Riders started promoting floats down the Deschutes in the early 1970s. That timing reads like cause and effect more than coincidence. People don’t float for fun through a demolished industrial corridor with no public access and no destination. They float through a park with parking, a takeout, and a name.

The Rough Riders called floating “quite relaxing,” while warning newcomers about log jams and waterfalls, a warning that carried real weight given the still-recent memory of five people drowning after being swept over an unmarked falls sometime in the 1960s. They noted that a float from the East Olympia railroad bridge down to the brewery could take about eight hours during high spring flows. In June 1972, police searched for a group of missing juveniles and found them safe, floating on a raft near the brewery. By 1978 the activity had become fully organized, with the Deschutes River Float & Picnic drawing crowds for a run from the Henderson Boulevard bridge down to Tumwater Falls Park. The early 1980s brought a surge in inner tubing specifically, and with it came friction. A 1983 article described complaints from riverfront residents about trespassing and safety, and tubers who ran into trouble often ended up “bedraggled” on someone’s back lawn, looking for help. Thurston County considered putting up warning signs at the popular entry points.

In 1988, the city of Tumwater bought a stretch of pasture along Henderson Boulevard and built Pioneer Park. On paper it’s a sports and nature park, all ballfields and trails. In practice it became the unofficial starting line for the float, several miles downstream of the old East Olympia entry point, with enough parking to make the whole thing genuinely accessible for the first time. What it didn’t do was settle the question the dam raises a mile downstream. Pioneer Park sits at the edge of the slack water zone, near it or inside it depending on the flow that year and depending on exactly where within the park you put in. The 1988 purchase moved the uncertainty upstream rather than resolving it, handing the question to individual people choosing a launch spot, most of whom have no idea the choice even matters.

The dam itself is now well past a century old, built in phases between 1900 and 1913, a concrete gravity structure that at this age almost certainly carries no steel reinforcement inside it. Washington State classifies it as a Category 3, low hazard dam, meaning that if it failed, nobody’s life would be at risk and the resulting damage would be minor. That classification is its own quiet form of forgetting, a bureaucratic note that says this structure doesn’t need anyone’s attention. Structurally, though, it’s in better shape than its age suggests. Because it’s keyed directly into bedrock, it’s largely immune to the foundation scour that kills most aging dams during overtopping. Predating rebar reinforcement by decades, it’s also immune to the internal rusting and spalling that eventually destroys modern concrete. And our mild, wet climate spares it the freeze-thaw cycling that cracks concrete apart in harsher places.

It isn’t invulnerable. Vegetation works its way into old construction joints and slowly wedges them wider. Water percolating through the structure leaches calcium hydroxide out of the cement over time, weakening it. A century of silt has built up behind the dam, adding a steady load against the upstream face. None of that adds up to sudden failure. Left alone, this dam is likely good for another 100 to 200 years, wearing away slowly at its joints and spillways rather than going all at once.

I emailed the Olympia Tumwater Foundation to ask about the dam’s structural condition. That’s the organization that turned the demolished powerhouse site into a park in the first place, the one that, whether they meant to or not, decided sixty years ago which parts of this history would stay visible and which would get hauled away. They’re looking into what they might have and get back to me later. I’ll update this post if they have anything.

So the next time you’re standing in Falls Park facing that uppermost falls, know what you’re actually looking at.

It’s a dam built in 1900 to solve a hydroelectric company’s dry summer problem, expanded in 1913 after a legal war over a lake most people have never heard of, stripped of its machinery in 1962, and left standing, quietly, as the scenic backdrop for a park built on top of its own demolition.

The float culture that treats this river as a summer playground likely exists because that park got built, not despite the dam’s industrial history but because a foundation cleared away the parts of that history that looked too much like a factory. And the ambiguity never really left. Somebody launching a tube from Pioneer Park on an ordinary August afternoon has no way of knowing, without doing the math we just did, whether they’re floating on a free river or drifting through a captured pool behind a hundred-and-twenty-year-old dam. Most of them will never think to ask. The current under them, either way, carries the settled residue of a legal fight, a corporate merger, a demolition crew, and a social structure built on a slack pool and two parks.

Rhyming History and the Center Not Holding

August 8, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Somebody in the Daily Olympian newsroom set the type for a headline on election night in 1896 that would have sounded impossible two years earlier.

Fusionists Get It All.

Every county office in Thurston County, captured by a coalition of Populists, Democrats, and Silver Republicans, three factions that had spent most of the decade distrusting each other more than they distrusted the Republicans. Two years before, the same county had gone the opposite direction entirely, a clean sweep from top to bottom, Sam Hyde to Sam Wiman, Republican the whole way down. Something had come loose in the space of one election cycle.

It’s coming loose again.

In Montana, an independent named Seth Bodnar is polling six points ahead of the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, in a race the sitting Republican senator chose not to run in at all. Steve Daines withdrew from his own primary at the last possible minute and handed the nomination to a hand-picked successor, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme. He did it rather than face the same current that pushed Bodnar out of a university presidency and into the race.

In Idaho, the Democratic nominee for Senate dropped out of his own contest a few days ago, not because he lost, but because his own party’s county chairs decided he couldn’t win and independent Todd Achilles could.

In Nebraska, the same thing happened a few weeks earlier. Democrat Cindy Burbank withdrew and cleared a direct path for independent Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and former union leader, to face Republican Pete Ricketts one-on-one. Osborn ran this same race in 2024 against a different Republican and lost by seven points, close enough in a state that red to get national Democratic strategists talking. They’re not being quiet about it either. Inside the party it already has a name, clearing the field, and there’s open pressure on Democratic nominees in Montana and South Dakota to do the same thing before November.

None of these three have heard of John R. Rogers. But, they’re running his play anyway.

Rogers is the reason 1896 looked the way it did, and getting to him means going back further, to the thing that put Thurston County farmers in a mood to blow up their own party in the first place. It wasn’t abstract. A farmer in 1894 who’d borrowed against next year’s wheat crop was paying that loan back in dollars that bought more than the dollars he’d borrowed. That’s what a gold standard does under deflation. Prices fall, so the debt doesn’t shrink, it grows, measured in the only thing that matters to a bank, which is what the dollar will buy. The Panic of 1893 had already wrecked the banks and dried up credit. Free Silver, the demand to coin silver without limit, was never really about metallurgy. It was a demand for enough new money in circulation that a farmer’s debt would shrink the way debts are supposed to, instead of getting heavier every harvest.

It is worth taking a small sidestep here to point out that the Populists (including Rogers) of this age were antisemitic and racists. This including the most famous Cascadian populist all the way down to the former Mayor of Tumwater, praising the former Confederacy.

In 1896, the trouble was that neither the Populists nor the Democrats could carry that demand alone in Washington State. The Democratic Party in the Pacific Northwest was still wearing the “party of rebellion” label left over from the Civil War, toxic to exactly the kind of voter it needed. The Populists had the energy but not the votes. So the two did something that looked, on paper, like a shotgun marriage. They fused their tickets, ran shared slates, and let the vessel do what neither party could do wearing its own name. It worked better than anyone expected. Rogers won the governorship with a 15,000 vote majority. James Hamilton Lewis and W.C. Jones took both congressional seats. The legislature flipped to a Fusionist majority so large it barely resembled the body that had convened two years earlier.

That’s the same math running in Montana, Idaho, and Nebraska right now, just without the word “fusion” attached to it. Bodnar only beats Alme in a poll if the Democrat, Alani Bankhead, isn’t also on the ballot splitting the anti-Alme vote. Run all four candidates and Alme wins with 41 percent. Take Bankhead out and Bodnar wins 50 to 44.

That’s the same toxic-brand arithmetic that pushed Populists and Democrats onto one ticket in 1896. In Idaho, that math wasn’t left to voters at all. Ada County Democrats gave their own nominee an ultimatum, raise real money or step aside, and when he couldn’t, he stepped aside, leaving Todd Achilles a clean shot at a three-term incumbent in a state that hasn’t elected a non-Republican senator since 1974. Nobody called it fusion. It’s the identical mechanism wearing a 2026 haircut, a party choosing to disappear from a ballot line because its own name was the obstacle.

Rogers’s win is where most tellings of 1896 stop, as if the story ends at the ballot box. It doesn’t. What happened to him after he took office is the part that should worry anyone rooting for Bodnar, Achilles, or Osborn to actually get somewhere if they win.

Once Rogers had the office, he governed like a man trying to balance a ledger. He vetoed spending bills the radicals in his own coalition wanted, ran the state efficiently, paid down debt, kept things orderly, and in doing all of that, became the kind of moderate his voters had just spent an election cycle rejecting.

The Fusionist legislature he presided over spent 1897 fighting itself instead of legislating, radicals against moderates against Silver Republicans, burning more energy on who would be the next U.S. Senator than on the platform that had elected them. They did pass one thing that mattered. The Barefoot Schoolboy Act equalized school funding between poor counties and rich ones, and it’s still worth remembering for that alone.

But one landmark law wasn’t what the base had been promised. Railroad regulation stalled. Tax reform stalled. The energy that swept Thurston County in November 1896 had nowhere to go by the spring of 1897 except sideways, into infighting, or backward, into disillusionment.

And then the ground under the whole revolt shifted for a reason that had nothing to do with any of them. Gold turned up in the Klondike in July 1897, and Seattle became the supply depot for the rush north. New gold flooding into circulation did quietly what Free Silver had been demanding all along, it loosened the money supply, and as it did, wheat and timber prices came back up. The debt trap that had radicalized a generation of farmers started closing on its own.

Then, in April 1898, the country went to war with Spain, and national attention swung hard toward patriotism and away from agrarian grievance, a mood Republicans used against the Populists by painting them as unstable at exactly the wrong moment. By the 1898 midterms, Thurston County had swung back to the Republicans in what the papers called a Redemption.

Which raises the question: What’s the Klondike this time? Is there some external shock sitting off in 2027 or 2028 that quietly resolves the affordability crisis fueling Bodnar and Osborn the way an accidental gold rush resolved the debt crisis fueling Rogers? Nobody running these 2026 campaigns knows, and neither do I. That’s the honest limit of the parallel. 1896 is a closed case with a known ending.

Washington already ran a version of this experiment once this cycle, and it didn’t work. A Spokane firefighter and Marine veteran named Nate Powell ran independent against Republican incumbent Michael Baumgartner in the state’s 5th District, arguing the real fight was top against bottom, not left against right. He came in third in the primary, well behind the Democrat, Carmela Conroy, who’s the one headed to November. Nobody cleared the field for him. The vessel doesn’t launch itself just because the conditions are right, and without a party willing to step aside first, sometimes the old label still beats the new one.

I can tell you the mechanism rhymes. I can’t tell you whether Bodnar governs like Rogers if he wins, moderate, disciplined, quietly disappointing to the people who put him there, or whether this cycle breaks differently. The pattern is real. The ending isn’t written.

There’s a name for what 1896 turned out to be a hinge of. It’s worth naming now that the shape of the thing is on the table instead of before. In the Strauss-Howe generational framework, 1896 sits at the exact point where a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era, resolves into a First Turning, a High. The three decades before it, stretching back to the Civil War, read as one long unresolved argument about who the country belonged to. McKinley’s win over Bryan didn’t just settle an election, it settled that argument, and industrial capitalism came out on top of agrarian populism for a generation. What’s easy to miss is that the losing side didn’t actually lose everything. The Progressive Era that followed spent the next two decades quietly building the very reforms Populists had demanded, in a form industrial capitalism could live with. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is Free Silver’s demand for flexible currency, granted seventeen years late.

That’s the pattern that later got a cleaner name, New Centrism, or pragmatic populism, and it isn’t the same thing as the neoliberal centrism of the 1990s that mostly told populist grievances to sit down. New Centrism absorbs the grievance instead of dismissing it. Regional decline, industrial hollowing out, a supply chain that snapped during a crisis, all of it gets folded into a stabilized version of statecraft rather than argued away. The 1890s version of that move ended in a central bank. Whatever 2026’s version ends in, reshored manufacturing, renewed antitrust legislation and enforcement, industrial policy with bipartisan cover, something else, it’ll probably look less like a revolution and more like the establishment quietly stealing the insurgents’ better ideas once the insurgents themselves are gone.

New Centrism matters now for the same reason William Butler Yeats was worried about the center when he wrote “The Second Coming,” in the six lines that begin “Things fall apart” and run through the line about the worst being full of passionate intensity.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We see the behavior change in politicians. The best don’t step up, and the arena gets more combative and less meaningful, because the center has literally moved, off from the space between the two parties toward something else. Like a black hole passing through a solar system, it pulls the planets off their old orbits.

Because of first-past-the-post elections, American politics keeps pulling back toward two durable party labels. We’re not a parliamentary system where a small party can live off the land until it achieves relevance. There’s no living off the land here. So there’s a clock on independents, and it runs until they change the political center enough that the parties themselves adapt.

Thurston County is also where you can watch this whole cycle at true scale, small enough to see the machinery. Total Republican sweep in 1894. Total Fusionist sweep in 1896. Total Republican Redemption by 1898. And it didn’t stop being a live pattern after 1898, either.

In 2016, an independent slate took over the Thurston County Commission the same way, riding local frustration with both establishment brands. None of these were permanent third-party breaks. They were bridges. The county used the independent label to force a conversation, and then the national parties, eventually, adapted enough to win the county back.

Whether 2026 independents are a version of Rogers, or something the pattern hasn’t produced before, isn’t a question history can answer in advance. What history can say is narrower and still worth saying.

When a party brand goes toxic enough, voters don’t abandon their actual demands, they just stop being willing to hear those demands from the party that’s carrying them. They reach for whatever vessel is clean enough to carry the argument instead, independent, fusion, whatever the label happens to be that decade. The vessel does its job either way. It breaks the deadlock. It forces the parties that lost the argument to go steal the winning ideas in private, a decade or two later, once nobody’s watching closely enough to call it surrender.

Maytown and the Long Tide

August 1, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Maytown was flooded before it had a name. Around 16,500 years ago an ice dam gave way, releasing a wall of meltwater that tore south across what would become southern Thurston County. This was the Tanwax Flood, one of the last violent acts of the Vashon Stade, and it did more than carve the ground. It wrote a script that everything afterward would follow.

The flood arrived at the tail end of the Fraser Glaciation, after the Puget Lobe had pushed as far south as Tenino and buried the site under some 200 meters of ice. When the ice began retreating and the climate warmed, the meltwater had nowhere easy to go, with the northern outlets still choked with ice. So the water was forced south instead, funneling through what is now the Chehalis River valley like water through a pinched hose. When the Tanwax dam broke, that pressure let go all at once. The surge swept across Rocky and Maytown prairies, dropping massive loads of sand, gravel, and boulders as it lost energy and spread out across the flats.

That single event set up the next 16,000 years. The flood left behind a rare glacial outwash prairie, flat and porous, resting on an estimated 20.6 million cubic yards of high-quality gravel. It carved broad paleochannels through the landscape too, the same low, open paths that railroads would later follow when they crisscrossed the county. The land was flat, well-drained, and full of raw material. That combination made it a target long before anyone thought to develop it. The flood didn’t just shape Maytown’s geology. It built the site’s entire future resume: a place suited for transit, for extraction, for anything that needed wide open space and didn’t mind a little distance from town.

For millennia, that resume sat as grass and gravel under an open sky. Then, in the 1940s, the tide came back in, this time manmade.

The Pacific Powder Co. began acquiring and leasing land at Maytown in the 1940s to manufacture dynamite, drawn by the same flatness and isolation that had once channeled glacial meltwater. By 1964 the operation had grown enough that the Hercules Powder Co. bought the property outright, expanding it to roughly 1,625 acres. For the next several decades, the plant was one of the region’s main suppliers of explosives for the roads, tunnels, and dams going up across the Pacific Northwest. Workers handled nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and ammonium nitrate with sparkless tools, dressed in specialized clothing, working to the sound of music piped in to mask the tension of the place.

That tension broke loose more than once. An explosion leveled a gun cotton storage house in January 1954, killing a workman named Amos George Owens. Three years later, in January 1957, a blast at the nitro facility killed 31-year-old Earl Thomas Riggs. The danger wasn’t contained to the plant grounds either. One of the company’s trucks exploded in Roseburg, Oregon, in 1959, killing 13 people and leading to an indictment of Pacific Powder Co. for involuntary manslaughter. Even after Hercules took over, the risk didn’t disappear. A 1967 explosion in a spent acid line did enough damage to shut the whole plant down for repairs.

By the time the operation wound down, the plant had left more than memories behind. Decades of manufacturing had worked lead, asbestos, petroleum products, and the carcinogen dinitrotoluene into the soil and groundwater, a kind of silt that stayed long after the industrial tide had gone out. Citifor removed more than 9,000 tons of contaminated soil in 2006 alone, and the Port of Tacoma later excavated 20 million tons more. Even with all that work, the Department of Ecology still ranked the property a high-risk hazardous waste site in the early 2000s. The powder works was gone. Its residue had settled in for good.

Before the water fully receded from the industrial era, one more wave broke over Maytown, and this one had nothing to do with commerce.

In late August 1969, the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair took over the Rainier Hereford Ranch next door to the powder works, close enough to share its dust. Nearly 30,000 people showed up for a lineup that included Steve Miller and Country Joe and the Fish, modeled loosely on the original Sky River festival and on Woodstock. It was a rogue wave, sudden and enormous, cresting over a cattle ranch for a few days before pulling back out just as fast.

The surge met resistance almost immediately. Local residents organized as the Stop the Rock Festival Committee, led by a member of the John Birch Society. Their objections went well past noise. They worried openly about the organizers’ sympathies with the Black Panthers and what they called the glorification of communist movements. Legal challenges even argued that the music itself would cause nearby cattle to lose flesh from the stress. Once the festival was underway, open nudity and drug use gave the opposition more to point at, and the Catholic Archdiocese ran newspaper ads with photos of topless attendees, hoping to shock the public into demanding prosecutions.

The backlash outlasted the festival by years. The Thurston County Commission responded with strict new ordinances that effectively banned festival camping, building a legal dike meant to keep that particular kind of flood from ever rising again. It worked. Nothing like Sky River has happened at Maytown since.

The Thurston County Commission wasn’t done caring about what happened on that stretch of glacial outwash prairie.

What followed instead was a slower, more bureaucratic kind of tide, rising and falling in ambition rather than water.

In 2006, the Port of Tacoma bought 745 acres of the old munitions site for $21.25 million, aiming to build the South Sound Logistics Center, a rail-served depot that would let cargo skip past I-5 gridlock. This was a sort of realization of the vision of the nearby Maytown townsite, founded as a community on the confluence of railroads.

Because a port can’t operate inside another port’s territory without permission, Tacoma entered an interlocal agreement with the Port of Olympia to develop it jointly. That agreement collapsed in 2008, after pressure from local residents and the group Friends of Rocky Prairie pushed Olympia to withdraw.

The Port tried again in 2010, agreeing to sell the land to Maytown Sand and Gravel. Thurston County officials were accused of deliberately stalling the permits needed to close that sale. The resulting lawsuit worked its way to the Washington State Supreme Court by 2018. The court found that the county had violated the company’s due process rights, and the evidence suggested commissioners had pressured staff to manufacture an emergency just to slow the project down. A jury had already awarded $12 million in damages, split between the Port and the gravel company.

Even with that ruling in hand, the current kept shifting. NorthPoint Development offered $24.8 million in 2018 for a 2.9-million-square-foot logistics complex, only to see the deal collapse in 2021 when Thurston County denied the zoning change it needed. Each attempt followed the same pattern: ambition rising, hitting the wall of local opposition or legal obstruction, then receding again, leaving the land untouched but the fight a little more scarred.

The most recent agreement, a purchase deal with Miles Sand & Gravel signed in 2026 for $17.25 million, marks the lowest water mark yet. There’s no warehouse complex in this version, no attempt to reroute regional cargo through the prairie. The plan now is simpler and, in a way, more honest about what the land has always been for: extract the 20.6 million cubic yards of gravel the Tanwax Flood left behind 16,500 years ago. Before settling on Miles, the Port gave the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife first chance to buy the property and fold it into the adjacent wildlife area. The two sides couldn’t agree on a price. Friends of Rocky Prairie is left hoping the new owners honor the reclamation plans already on the books, which call for eventually turning the mined land into ponds and wildlife habitat.

Maytown isn’t a ghost town in the usual sense. It never had enough of a boom to leave behind the kind of emptiness that label implies. What it has instead is a long record of being processed, first by ice, then by dynamite, then by rock music and public outrage, then by lawsuits and zoning boards. Each wave has left its own layer of sediment on top of the last: some of it gravel, some of it legal precedent, some of it toxic residue still being dug out of the ground.

The current plan is to mine the very material the original flood put there, then hand the emptied land back to the prairie it once buried. Whether that actually happens is still an open question. Given the site’s history, the safest bet is that it’s less an ending than another recession, and that somewhere downstream, another wave of ambition is already gathering.

It could have been much, much worse

July 18, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

A few weeks back I wrote about a version of Olympia and Thurston County that kept its streetcars, tied them into regional rail, and grew up into something closer to a Pacific Northwest urbanist’s dream. Fun as a distraction, that essay gave me a chance to chase some historical what-ifs toward the best possible outcome.

This one runs the tape the other way. What if development here had gone worse instead of better? What if the highway planners of the 1950s had gotten the route they actually wanted, straight through the heart of Olympia, instead of the one they eventually settled for through Tumwater?

Short answer, it would’ve been bad on its own.

The longer answer, and the real point of this essay, is that a downtown freeway wouldn’t have stayed bad in just one place. Within a decade or two it would’ve run out of room, and the region would’ve ended up building a second, larger highway south of town to relieve it. Olympia would’ve gotten hit twice: once downtown, and once across what’s now protected rural land between the airport and Nisqually.

What Tumwater actually lost, and why it matters here

Local memory likes to say Interstate 5 killed downtown Tumwater. It’s a clean story, and it’s mostly wrong. Tumwater’s old river-based downtown had been dying for decades before anyone even drew up an interstate. The shift started in the early 1900s as railroad routes changed, and the real blow came in 1938, when the new Capitol Way bypassed the historic downtown completely. By the time I-5 construction started in the 1950s, Tumwater’s businesses had already moved toward Trosper Road. The city council signed off on running the freeway through the old downtown canyon partly because there wasn’t much of a downtown left to save.

That doesn’t mean the highway’s arrival was gentle, though. The route needed a 200-foot-wide path cut straight through Tumwater’s historic heart, and people were furious at first. The city council came around once the engineering made sense. In exchange for going along with it, Tumwater got some real concessions: a sewer line tied into Olympia’s system, an upgraded water system near the freeway, and a new Custer Way Bridge to replace the dangerously narrow 1915 Boston Street Bridge. By the time the route opened in 1958, the Trosper Road interchange had taken over as the city’s commercial center for good, and about a hundred buildings had been torn down or moved to clear the way.

There’s an irony underneath all this. Tumwater had already given up something once before, for pretty similar reasons. Back in 1915, the state wanted to dam the Deschutes Estuary to create what became Capitol Lake. Tumwater fought the idea for decades. Leopold Schmidt’s Olympia Brewing Company depended on the estuary’s connection to the Puget Sound to barge goods down to Olympia’s deepwater port, and a freshwater dam threatened both that route and their water rights. The Olympia Power and Light Company also feared the lake would damage their operations. The opposition finally broke at a 1941 town meeting, by which point Tumwater’s commercial center had already started drifting away from the river anyway. The lake was finished in 1951. Seven years later, the same city gave up its downtown to the freeway too, for pretty much the same reason. The thing being protected had already stopped being worth protecting.

None of this had to fall on Tumwater at all. For a while, the actual plan was to run the freeway straight through Olympia instead.

After World War II, Highway 99 funneled all through-traffic straight into the Olympia-Tumwater city centers, and the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Capitol Way became a real bottleneck, with through-traffic and local drivers fighting over the same narrow streets. A 1948 traffic survey started the planning for a limited-access route, called at different points the “Olympia Freeway” or the “Olympia Bypass.” The early designs were ambitious in the worst way.

Around the same time, that same pressure to move traffic through downtown showed up in a real political push to convert Olympia’s downtown streets to one-way. It was a kind of duct-tape-and-bailing-wire freeway, improvised out of streets that were already there.

The proposed route would have run through, or along, the Percival Creek Canyon near where the auto mall sits today, past the area that’s now Marathon Park, and from there crossed Capitol Lake through an underground tunnel or viaduct, coming up at the intersection of Adams Street and Tenth Avenue, right in the city core.

As if a tunnel wasn’t bad enough, engineers also proposed an elevated highway above Seventh Street as a cheaper alternative. It would’ve been a real-life Robert Moses nightmare, splitting downtown Olympia in two. And this wasn’t just idle talk. In the early 1950s, the City of Olympia and the state Department of Highways actually signed an agreement to move forward with the downtown route.

It fell apart in 1954. Not because anyone changed their mind about what it would do to the city, but because a Department of Highways review found it too expensive. Tunneling under a lake, or building an elevated structure through dense downtown blocks, cost more than the state wanted to spend. So engineers shifted to the Tumwater Canyon route instead: solid bedrock, cheaper to grade, and already half-emptied of the businesses that would’ve fought it.

And it’s worth remembering the downtown route wasn’t just a few blocks downtown. Getting from Percival Canyon to the Capitol Campus by tunnel or elevated causeway would’ve meant cutting across a good chunk of what’s now southwest Olympia. The impact on the east side of that route would’ve been just as serious, not some afterthought tacked onto the downtown disruption.

Why that wouldn’t have been the end of it

Here’s the part that makes this counterfactual worse than it looks at first. Say the 1954 cost review had gone the other way, and Olympia got its tunnel or its elevated highway through downtown. What if there was a governor who really liked the idea of a downtown interchange and pushed for it? What if the federal government stepped in to cover extra costs?

That alone would’ve gutted the city core about as badly as the real freeway gutted Tumwater’s canyon. But here’s the thing: a freeway squeezed onto an isthmus between a lake and a bay only has so much room to grow. Once traffic outgrew it, and it would have, there’d be nowhere left to add lanes.

So the same pressure that built the original bottleneck at Fourth and Capitol would’ve built up again, on a larger scale, probably within a generation. And the fix wouldn’t have been to widen the downtown route. It would’ve meant building an actual interstate-grade bypass south of the city, cutting between Olympia Airport and Nisqually to route traffic around the bottleneck entirely. Olympia would’ve ended up with the worst of both options: a freeway carved through downtown that still couldn’t handle the load, and a second, bigger highway carved through the rural south county to make up the difference.

That second highway is the part worth sitting with. Right now, the land between the airport and Nisqually stays mostly rural, and that’s partly thanks to the Growth Management Act’s boundaries. When an interstate bypasses a rural area, it often ends up protecting it. No exit ramp means no incentive for strip malls and drive-thrus, so farmsteads tend to stay whole instead of getting sliced up by rights-of-way. Towns near the freeway often trade their identity for convenience. Places the freeway skipped tend to keep something real, even if it looks like neglect from the road.

In this counterfactual, south Thurston County doesn’t get that protection. It becomes the freeway. The corridor between the airport and Nisqually, still pretty rural today, would’ve turned into the kind of stretch you see near any highway exit: gas stations, chain restaurants, parking lots. The thing that currently protects that land, sitting outside the highway grid, would never have had the chance to exist.

Chase this far enough and the whole regional map starts to shift. In our actual history, Lacey grew up because it was rejecting Olympia’s effort to annex eastwards, and the suburbs spread out along Pacific Avenue and Martin Way instead. Take that away, and the suburban growth pattern here would’ve followed the new southern route instead. Tumwater, already centered on its Trosper Road interchange, would’ve kept stretching east until it ran into Tanglewilde from the south, soaking up the space that Lacey actually grew to fill. Something like the South Sound Shopping Center would probably still exist, just not where it is now. It would sit at a Rich Road or Rainier Road interchange on the new southern interstate instead, anchoring the kind of sprawl that, in real life, never had a highway to grow around.

The lucky accident

None of this was planned as a mercy. The 1954 decision to abandon the downtown route was a budget call, made by engineers weighing tunnel costs against bedrock costs. Highway budget writers don’t think about the impact on the community, no one in the room was thinking about what it would spare. But that’s what it did. Tumwater absorbed one real wound: its historic canyon, cut open for a freeway, after it had already gave up on a similar fight once before over Capitol Lake. Downtown Olympia and rural south Thurston County absorbed nothing. The cheaper option just happened to also be the option that kept the damage contained to one place instead of two.

It’s a strange thing to be grateful for a highway department’s spreadsheet. But measured against the alternative, that’s roughly what happened.

Annexing the Future

July 11, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

For the first time in over fifty years, more people in Thurston County live inside a city than outside one. It could be an urbanist success story, zoning reform finally winning out, transit investment tipping the scale toward density. It isn’t. The real story’s older, weirder, and a lot less democratic. Once you see how it happened, I think it’s still worth calling out the right outcome.

This is the post I’m writing about the 2026 release of population estimates by OFM. Every year, the agency releases estimates as a guide for state spending. These estimates also give a picture of the changing shape of our communities.

You can see the lines cross in the 1970s and in 2020. The blue bars are the population captured by annexation, and is on the right hand axis, not the left.

This year’s data shows that between 1976 and 2020, unincorporated Thurston County outnumbered the incorporated cities every single year, a run that held for four and a half decades before it broke in the space of six. The trend started in 1976 because the late 70s saw two record years (in both percentage and raw numbers) of massive in-migration, most of which apparently ended up outside the cities.

But, that trend has finally started to shift But, if this were really about people choosing city life, you’d expect a gradual climb, year over year. Folks being priced out of car dependence drifting toward Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater one household at a time. That’s not what the numbers show. Instead you get a flat unincorporated population since 2008, a 5,000-person drop in one bizarre year, and then a string of specific years where the incorporated population jumps by two or three thousand people all at once. 2009. 2016. 2022.

Those aren’t migrations, they’re annexations.

Before 2009, annexation in Thurston County was small and constant. Cities picked up a parcel here and a parcel there, mostly empty land, occasionally a few dozen or a few hundred people riding along with it. Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater, and Yelm all added pieces most years, rarely anything anyone would call a headline. Lacey’s 1985 annexation brought in nearly 800 residents. Olympia added just over 180 in 1995. These were rounding errors against the county’s total population, just the ordinary housekeeping of city boundaries.

Then the housekeeping stopped and the big grabs started. Tumwater’s annexation, effective February 2008, brought in 2,553 residents in one motion. We’re going to focus on this particular annexation. In my memory, it felt like an existential change for Tumwater, we expected at the time a massive shift in population, that may have happened slower than we expected, given the housing crash a few years later.

Olympia added 562 people in June 2014, a smaller jump but still a departure for a city that usually moved in small numbers. Tumwater came back in January 2016 with the largest single annexation of the last fifteen years, 3,255 residents absorbed in one stroke. Lacey had its turn in 2021, running two separate annexations between May and September that added 1,535 and 978 residents, over 2,500 combined in a single year. Tumwater kept at it into 2022, a dozen smaller annexations in May plus a 332-resident addition in June, while Lacey added close to 100 more that spring. Lacey’s doing it again, with a March 2025 annexation projected to add 455 residents.

Cities were working through a handful of legal tools, deciding case by case and year by year when to catch up with development that had already happened around them. You see a pattern that has nothing to do with a slow cultural shift toward city living.

The old way: leverage, not consent

For most of Thurston County’s modern annexation history, the tool of choice was the Sixty Percent Petition Method. It let property owners representing 60 percent of a target area’s assessed value petition their way into a city on their own. Notice what’s doing the work in that sentence. Not 60 percent of residents. Sixty percent of assessed value. A handful of large landowners, sometimes just one or two big parcels, could decide the governmental future of everyone else living on that land, tenants included.

Where the petition method wasn’t quite enough on its own, cities reached for something even quieter: the “no-protest” utility agreement. Sign one of these to get city water or sewer, and you’d also signed away your right to fight annexation whenever the city decided to come collect.

This is coercive by design, and the state’s own Supreme Court flinched at it once. In 2002, Grant County Fire Protection District No. 5 v. City of Moses Lake found that bypassing a general vote of residents violated the state constitution. For a minute, it looked like the petition method might be finished. The court walked the ruling back not long after, and cities kept using the tool. Tumwater’s biggest annexation wave, the one that added 3,255 residents in a single stroke in 2016, happened well within this post-2002, still-contested legal window.

The fight nobody outside city hall saw

The clearest look at how contested this actually was comes from Tumwater’s 2007 annexation, 1,620 acres that went before the Thurston County Boundary Review Board on a narrow 3-2 vote. The board was one vote from saying no. What flipped it was a last-minute fire service agreement between Tumwater and the Black Lake Fire District, which stood to lose a third of its operating budget once the annexed area stopped paying into it. One dissenting board member called the deal a “shotgun marriage.” He wasn’t wrong. There are real political realities in swapping land between cities and the county, between special districts and city agencies. But, the decline of a rural special district and agreements based on you getting city water are not bad things.

Why the leverage was still the right call

Here’s where I land, and I think it’s a harder position than just cheering for density. The land inside that 1,620-acre annexation wasn’t all farmland waiting to be paved. It was already suburban, already built at a density and a distance from city boundaries that made a rural fire district and a county road department a worse fit for it than a city government with sewer lines already running past the property. The petition method and the utility agreements were ugly tools, built to let city and landowners jump the line without asking anyone’s permission. But the outcome they produced, in this case, matched governance to a landscape that had already been built. That’s not nothing. A fire district’s claim to keep serving an area doesn’t automatically outrank the question of who can actually do the job better once that area looks and functions like a city. If a city can run water, sewer, fire protection, and roads to a piece of land more efficiently than the county patchwork that grew up around it by accident, the district losing its slice of that territory isn’t an injustice. It’s a service boundary catching up to reality a few decades late.

That’s a different claim than “annexation is democratic,” which it mostly wasn’t. It’s a claim that the state spent thirty years building an escape hatch, that city services should follow city-level density, and that the escape hatch got used, however roughly, to reach that outcome.

The state noticed too

The more interesting shift, and the one I think will matter more going forward, is that leverage isn’t the only tool anymore. After 2002, the state built the Alternative Petition Method, which requires signatures from a majority of both property owners and registered voters, a real check the old method never had. Then came the Interlocal Agreement pathways, letting cities negotiate directly with counties over revenue sharing and infrastructure before annexing anything. In 2023 the legislature revived a sales tax credit specifically to pay cities for absorbing unincorporated growth areas over 2,000 people.

Boundary Review Boards are disappearing too. Spokane disbanded its board in 2012. Lewis County did the same as recently as 2026. The fights those boards used to referee are increasingly handled through negotiation instead of a contested vote.

Right around the time the old, coercive tools had already finished most of the job, the state built better ones.

What I can’t prove yet

I’d like to end this by telling you that all of this points toward a walkable, mixed-use future for Thurston County’s cities, third places and multimodal streets slowly replacing the cul-de-sacs that got annexed.

I can’t actually back that up.

Annexation moves a jurisdictional line, nothing else. It doesn’t retrofit a sidewalk or rezone a strip mall. Everything in this record shows governance catching up to sprawl, not sprawl getting undone. The most honest thing I can say is that Thurston County’s cities now have the tools, and increasingly the financial incentive, to govern the suburban land they’ve absorbed. What they choose to do with that authority, whether it produces the kind of denser, more human-scaled development that we want, is still an open question. That part is hope, not history.

Freedom, Washington

July 4, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Washington spent thirty-six years as a territory before Congress finally granted statehood in 1889. This in-between space lasted longer than almost any other territory in the country, and that wasn’t an accident.

Robert Ficken makes the case in Washington Territory: for most of those thirty-six years, the place didn’t function as one territory at all. The Cascades split it into two economies, two identities that barely spoke to each other.

Western Washington ran on San Francisco capital and San Francisco trade.

Eastern Washington answered to Portland, making it effectively an arm of eastern Oregon. It moved its wheat through Portland, took whatever price Portland offered.

What the territory lacked wasn’t ambition. It was a spine, some internal run of track solid enough to bind two halves that had never had much reason to look at each other. Only when railroads finally punched through the mountains and bridged the Columbia in the mid-1880s, threading one economy into the other for the first time, did the territory start acting like a single place.

Before statehood, Washington was not free. Territorial residents had almost no say in their own government. The delegate they sent to Congress couldn’t vote, and they still paid federal taxes and lived under federal law anyway, the exact arrangement that had fueled a revolution a century before. Even their governor and judges came from Washington, D.C., appointed as political rewards to men who’d rarely set foot in the West, who knew little about the place they’d been sent to run. They often left the moment something better came along.

For decades, the only real route between eastern Washington and the coast ran down the Columbia River, and Portland controlled it. It set the rates. It picked the terminals. The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company charged whatever it wanted to move wheat and goods out of the Inland Empire, and that turned eastern Washington into less of a neighbor and more of a captive market. If you grew wheat near Walla Walla or Spokane, Portland decided what you’d earn for it.

Frustrated by a decade of asking and getting nowhere, Washington’s non-voting congressional delegate asked Congress in 1877 for an “enabling act,” permission for the territory to write its own state constitution. Congress didn’t answer. So Washingtonians stopped waiting for permission. They elected delegates and sent them to Walla Walla in June of 1878, where the group spent forty days writing a constitution of their own, official blessing or not.

The choice of Walla Walla wasn’t random. It was the biggest city in the territory at the time, built on the wheat boom rolling across the Palouse, and picking it was a deliberate answer to the very split Ficken writes about, a way of telling eastern Washington it mattered just as much as the coast did. The delegates cared enough about healing that divide that they even invited northern Idaho to send a delegate, hoping to fold the Panhandle into the new state. Northern Idaho had more in common with Walla Walla and Spokane than with Boise. Its wheat and timber flowed toward the same captive Columbia River corridor as everyone else’s in eastern Washington.

You can almost imagine different state lines that would have produced states earlier. If western Washington had split and eastern Washington and northern Idaho joined, these states might have made it into the union faster.

What the delegates at Walla Walla proposed makes sense once you remember the timing. This was before the Northern Pacific had finished its transcontinental line, while the Portland monopoly still had its foot on eastern Washington’s neck, while outside corporate power was still, plain and simple, the enemy. The 1878 constitution came out swinging. It capped freight rates, blocked corporations from meddling in local politics, and went after the Columbia River monopolists’ grip on local farmers piece by piece.

Voters loved it. In November of 1878, they approved the constitution by better than two to one, 6,537 in favor against 3,236 opposed. Then they sent it off to Washington, D.C., and Congress just ignored it. Nobody in D.C. wanted to admit a territory that heavily Republican, especially not one trying to rewrite corporate law and redraw the borders of two other territories in the same document. The bill died quietly. The 1878 constitution never became law. It just sat there for eleven years, a preview of an argument Washington would have to have all over again.

What finally broke Portland and San Francisco’s grip was a bigger outside power. Congress had chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad back in 1864, but its headquarters was in New York, and its money came from Wall Street, first from Jay Cooke, later from Henry Villard and J.P. Morgan. When the NP finally built its line west, it wasn’t doing Washington Territory any favors. It was chasing profit, and Congress had handed it a massive incentive to do so, alternating sections of public land stretching forty miles deep on either side of the tracks, millions of acres of Washington timber and farmland, all of it controlled from New York. Because the NP owned the land and picked the route, it could make or break entire towns. Instead of routing its saltwater terminus through an established city like Olympia or Seattle, the railroad built its own town from scratch at New Tacoma, simply because it already owned every lot there.

By the time seventy-five delegates gathered in Olympia on July 4, 1889, they’d already watched the Northern Pacific spend a few years transforming the territory, laying track, pulling in settlers, building the very economic case that finally convinced Congress statehood made sense. The irony was hard to miss. The delegates weren’t grateful. They were nervous. They’d just watched one outside monopoly get smashed by an even bigger one, and now that bigger one owned a huge share of the state they were about to create.

That nervousness is the whole reason Article XII of the Washington Constitution, titled “Corporations Other Than Municipal,” turned into one of the most heavily fought sections in the entire document. It reads less like ordinary legal boilerplate and more like a list of grievances.

Section 1 barred the legislature from ever again handing a company like the Northern Pacific a custom charter loaded with special privileges, the way corrupt territorial legislatures once had, and it kept the legislature’s right to amend or revoke any charter whenever it wanted. Section 7 went after the “foreign corporation” problem directly, meaning any company headquartered outside Washington, and made it illegal for one of those companies to get better treatment in the state than a homegrown competitor. Sections 13 through 22 read like eastern Washington’s wheat farmers dictated them personally. Railroads became “public highways” under the new constitution, and railroad companies became “common carriers,” language that put them under strict state regulation. Discriminatory freight rates got banned outright, so a railroad couldn’t quietly charge a small farmer more per mile than a big shipper, or punish a town that had crossed it. Pooling, the practice of supposedly competing lines secretly agreeing to fix prices instead of actually competing, got prohibited too.

None of it was as radical as it could have been. Corporate lobbyists worked the halls of the old wooden capitol all that summer, and some of the sharper teeth from the 1878 draft, personal liability for corporate directors chief among them, got filed down before the final vote. Washington still needed East Coast capital to keep building, and the framers knew it.

Line the two constitutions up next to each other and they tell a single story in two acts. The 1878 constitution was written by people with nothing left to lose, before the Northern Pacific had finished a single mile of track, while Portland was still the only monopoly in the room and outside corporate power was simply the enemy, full stop. Congress killed it without a second thought. The 1889 constitution was written by people who’d already made the deal. They’d already watched the Northern Pacific break Portland’s grip, already build the towns, already decide who got a station and who didn’t. Statehood only became possible because Washington accepted that bargain. Article XII wasn’t an attempt to refuse the deal. It was an attempt to survive it, a leash written into the state’s founding document for a monster the state had already let across the threshold.

That’s the same trick the country pulled a century earlier, played out on a smaller stage. Franklin didn’t go to Paris because he loved the French monarchy. He went because Britain wasn’t going anywhere without a bigger power tipping the scales, and France had its own reasons to want London humbled. The alliance worked, and it also became something the young United States spent years trying to wriggle back out of. Within a decade, Washington’s own Farewell Address was warning the country against permanent foreign entanglements, and by the end of the 1790s the alliance with France had curdled into an undeclared war at sea. The country used France to win its independence, then spent a generation making sure France couldn’t collect on the debt. Washington Territory ran the same play on a faster clock. It used the Northern Pacific to win its independence from Portland and Washington DC, then wrote Article XII that same year, not a decade later, to make sure the Northern Pacific couldn’t collect either.

Self-governance, in both cases, was never a clean break. It was a deal cut by whoever held the leverage to cut it, followed almost immediately by a second deal meant to limit the first. Washington’s framers understood that as well as anyone in Philadelphia or Paris ever did. They just wrote their version into Article XII instead of a treaty. That’s worth remembering every Fourth of July in Washington.

We mark our statehood that got bought and paid for, same as the revolution they’re meant to echo. Both times, the generation that cut the deal spent its very next act making sure that deal couldn’t turn around and own them.

Le Morte d’Lacey

June 27, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Last week, when I wrote about the sale of the South Sound Center by Bob Blume’s family to a real estate developer quietly closed a chapter for a region whose very geography Blume had shaped through his mid-century ambitions. He’s often called the “Father of Lacey,” and the title fits: he was the son of a janitor who arrived in the South Sound as a soldier and stayed to sell real estate. His vision wasn’t just to build a shopping center. It was to create a new kind of “downtown” for a community that didn’t yet exist.

Before Blume, the land east of Olympia was a landscape of “ghost plats,” lots laid out in the 1890s as the “New State Addition,” a traditional grid that was an optimistic monument to a get-rich-quick fever that evaporated in the Panic of 1893. By the 1960s, those residential blocks were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume sensed a shift coming. The era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail had arrived, and he saw the newly built Interstate 5 as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp was a port for business.

That private vision, though, required public infrastructure that the unincorporated fields of Lacey couldn’t provide. Blume and other local leaders realized they couldn’t afford to build the necessary roads and sewers on their own, so they pushed for Lacey’s incorporation in 1966. The municipality was literally built to support a mall.

For decades, Lacey’s identity was being “whatever Olympia isn’t,” the big-box sibling defined entirely by what Blume started. But sixty years on, the regional “river of commerce” has left a complex and costly legacy that the city is only now starting to work through.

The optimism Blume felt looking at those I-5 off-ramps tracked with a national mood. The interstate highway system was, by the broad numbers, a genuine triumph: it accounted for roughly a quarter of total U.S. productivity growth between 1950 and 1989, and the system is now so woven into the economy that removing it would shrink real U.S. GDP by 3.9%, a loss of up to $619 billion. But the success of the “river” came at a localized net loss for many of the communities it actually ran through.

The hidden costs of car-centric development are staggering, and they reach into municipal budgets in ways that Blume’s generation never had to reckon with. Sprawl of the kind Blume championed has become a form of wealth extraction from the cities it creates, pushing up the cost of public infrastructure by up to 40% and locking those cities into a structural maintenance burden of roughly $1 trillion a year across the country. Lacey, born from the mall, is now hitting the age where the full bill is coming due.

Lacey at 60: Status Report

Sixty years in, Lacey presents what you might call a Pavement Paradox. The 2025 State of the Streets report shows an average Pavement Condition Index of 84.6, with 96.8% of the city’s roads rated “good” or “very good.” Those numbers look like a success story. They’re not.

The high average is a mathematical illusion sustained by growth. New roads in newly annexed areas are propping up the network scores and hiding the deterioration happening in the city’s older core. That trick is running out of road. To clear the current maintenance backlog and hit an optimal network PCI of 90, the city is looking at a bill of $56.4 million, and if funding stays flat, the network PCI is projected to fall to 72 within a decade.

The city’s physical layout tells an equally uncomfortable story. Blume’s blueprint was built around moving cars quickly, not moving people, and the result is that 43% of Lacey’s street network has no sidewalks at all. In the older residential areas south of I-5, where the city was originally founded and where most of the affordable housing still is, sidewalks are often incomplete or just missing entirely. If you don’t drive, or can’t, the city is hostile territory.

Lacey’s planning documents use a Level of Traffic Stress scale, where LTS 1 is comfortable for all ages and LTS 4 is a real barrier to getting around.

Pedestrian conditions in the [Urban Growth Area] are predominantly LTS 4… Any roadway outside of neighborhoods without pedestrian facilities receives a PLTS of 4.

For sixty years, Lacey grew by building for cars. It’s now hit a point where it can’t widen its way out of congestion.

The city’s response has been to essentially reverse the Blume Blueprint. Lacey has moved away from a purely car-focused model toward a managed, multimodal approach, and a big part of that shift is the designation of “Strategy Corridors,” key segments like Sleater-Kinney Road and College Street where road widening is off the table. Instead of adding lanes, the city is going with road diets, roundabouts, and land-use changes to handle growth, trying to preserve community scale rather than giving more ground to the river of commerce. It’s a genuine break from the logic of the 1960s.

The city has also adopted a Multimodal Level of Service guideline that puts walking and biking first, with a new target of getting a low-stress bike route within about half a mile of every resident. That’s a direct response to the isolation that fragmented, mall-centered zoning created over the past sixty years. And by adopting a Safety Action Plan in 2025 focused on cutting serious injuries and fatalities, the city is finally acknowledging that moving cars fast can’t be the main goal anymore.

Lacey at 60 is a city going through a difficult but necessary maturation. It was born as a planning mistake, a municipality created to be the infrastructure arm of a private shopping mall. For decades it took the path of least resistance, building out a suburban auto-landscape that worked at the macroeconomic level but left residents with missing sidewalks, high traffic stress, and a $56 million maintenance backlog. Switching from a vehicle Level of Service standard to a Multimodal Level of Service is the city’s way of saying it’s finally trying to serve its residents instead of its commuters.

The “River of Commerce” built the city. It also cut it into isolated pieces that the current generation now has to stitch back together. Blume’s family sold the South Sound Center and moved on. The people of Lacey are the ones left living in the world he built. As the city looks toward 2045, the challenge is to become a place defined not by its proximity to an off-ramp, but by whether it actually works for the people who live there. The detour has lasted sixty years. The return trip has only just begun.

Bob Blume, Olympia and the New State

June 20, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 3 Comments

When Bob Blume wanted to build a shopping center on rural land east of Olympia, he knew he’d have to give something away. The interstate had already cut through from Olympia up to Tacoma, and the era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail was here. There was no city off the Sleater-Kinney exit to support a large-scale retail development, but Blume dreamed the mall could one day be the downtown of a new one.

We can forgive Blume for using “downtown” to mean any commercial development surrounded by houses, because Olympia’s actual downtown was being carved up with parking lots at the time.

This week, the old South Sound Center was sold by the family of Bob Blume to a San Diego real estate developer. Blume himself passed away almost 20 years ago, but his legacy transformed Olympia by pulling at the frayed strings of our historic development patterns, tugging us further and further east into an annexation war that would eventually mean the creation of the City of Lacey.

But let’s take a step back 70 years before Blume to the first time anyone thought of building here.

The Ghost Plats and the Railroad

Long before the first shovel struck ground for a department store, the land was known as the New State Addition to Olympia. This massive 34-block neighborhood was laid out in a traditional right-angle grid, with long rectangular blocks, an optimistic monument to the get-rich-quick fever that gripped Washington in the 1890s. These “paper plats” were often sold to distant investors who never realized their property was frequently nothing more than open land. Decades before cars changed how we think of land and distance, there was a dream of Olympia’s blocks stretching east into what is now Lacey.

But when the Panic of 1893 hit, the imaginary wealth and city evaporated, leaving behind ghost plats” streets that existed only in local government records.

Late 1950s, you can see edge of Olympia, the outlines of the old plat and where the South Sound Center was in yellow.

The grid was eventually interrupted in 1936 when Weyerhaeuser constructed the Chehalis Western Railroad, bisecting the New State plat and creating the industrial line that would eventually serve as the western border of the South Sound Center. By the 1960s, these residential blocks were slowly being developed but were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume, sensing the shift toward a car-centric society, because we’d literally built an interstate through the northern half of the New State Addition, began buying up and consolidating the old parcels, requesting vacations of roads that would never be built, to construct what he envisioned as a modern downtown for a new community.

The “Father of Lacey” and the Risk of the Big Box

The history of the center is really the personal story of Blume, a man often called the “Father of Lacey.” Born the son of a janitor in 1928, he quit school after the 8th grade to help his family, working jobs that included shoveling coal into boilers. He arrived in the South Sound as a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis and decided to stay after his discharge in the 1950s to sell real estate.

Blume’s vision wasn’t unconventional for the time. Like all other mall developers, he viewed the newly constructed Interstate as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp acted as a port for business.

That observation, though, was oddly lost on local financing. When he approached Olympia bankers for a loan, they legendarily laughed at him, dismissing the idea that anyone would drive out to the unincorporated fields of Lacey to shop. Undeterred, Blume secured funding in New York City and set his sights on a major anchor tenant to make the mall viable: Sears, Roebuck & Co.

The corporation’s policy required developers to donate the land for their stores as a condition of building. To secure the anchor he needed, Blume was forced to donate a full third of his land to the company, a sacrifice that made the shopping center viable, drawing in major tenants like Peoples and F.W. Woolworth.

That donation, and the eventual sale of what would become Target, carved up the parcel so the piece sold this week looks more like a jigsaw puzzle.

It was also a direct strike on downtown Olympia. Sears’ move to Lacey was a loss for the city, a sign of the change that would keep transforming downtown as larger national retailers left for Lacey and the Westside, chasing modern buildings surrounded by parking. Downtown adapted, narrowing its focus to smaller local retailers. But the decades of downtown doomerism started with Sears taking free land from Blume.

A Mall as the Mother of a City

The South Sound Center was the final reason for Lacey’s creation, the economic center-of-gravity that physically and politically birthed the city. In the early 1960s, the area was unincorporated and lacked basic municipal infrastructure.

The 1960s were marked by a fierce border war between Olympia and Lacey, triggered by Olympia’s aggressive use of assessed value annexations that moved its boundary east to Lilly Road by 1964. Olympia wanted to protect its retail base after Sears left for Lacey and began eating up land to do it. Lacey leaders resisted, claiming it was because the annexation process often bypassed a popular vote of the affected residents.

Realizing they couldn’t afford to build infrastructure privately, Blume and other local leaders, including A.G. Homann, the South Sound Center’s general contractor, pushed for incorporation, looking to leverage a city’s power to issue bonds for the infrastructure the new mall required. After a failed attempt in 1964, the incorporation effort succeeded in 1966, by a narrow margin of only 240 votes. Homann was sworn in as the city’s first Mayor, the moment the mall’s needs were finally codified into a new municipality.

Lacey’s original successful incorporation actually stretched further west than the current city, pushing past Boulevard Road. Olympia struck back by utilizing an archaic 1890 law that allowed the entire City of Olympia to vote on annexing Lacey’s western neighborhoods. Olympia voters agreed, and lopped that land back into the city. Lacey challenged the move, but the Washington Supreme Court upheld it, permanently shifting Olympia’s border east to its current orientation.

The decade of tension culminated in 1969 with a failed proposal to consolidate the two cities into one, a measure defeated by only 30 votes in Olympia and rejected by a 3-to-1 margin in Lacey.

Surviving

The South Sound Center’s reign as the largest retail area in Thurston County lasted just over ten years. The 1978 opening of the Capital Mall on Olympia’s Westside kicked off what local observers called a “retailing Grand Prix,” and the competition with national shopping center owners who had deep pockets threatened the center’s dominance.

The South Sound Center survived through constant adaptation, including the sale of the middle portion of the parcel to Target and the closure of the mall’s central walkway.

One of the stranger running failures of the commercial community around the mall was the decades-long campaign to rename Sleater-Kinney Road to South Sound Boulevard. It was driven by local businessmen who believed the historic name was hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and irrelevant to the area’s commercial identity. As early as 1967, Blume himself requested the change, a move later backed by the South Sound National Bank and other merchants who wanted the stretch between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue renamed. Jack Lewis, president of the Panorama Corporation, simultaneously proposed renaming the portion south of Pacific Avenue to Panorama Boulevard, dismissing the pioneer name as a “drab” title with no connection to anything in Lacey. \

The proposal met fierce opposition from residents and descendants of the Sleater and Kinney families, who’d homesteaded the land in 1880 and helped clear the original road. The Lacey City Council voted unanimously in January 1981 to keep the original name, and the proponents eventually gave up.

The End of the Blume Era

Bob Blume died in 2007, leaving behind a legacy that had turned a ghost plat into a new kind of city. In a final note on the decline of big box retail, Sears, the anchor that had cost Blume a third of his land but made his vision viable, left the center in 2020, thirteen years after his death.

With the Blume family’s sale of the rest of the property this week, the land where the South Sound Center sits falls out of family ownership for the first time in over 60 years.

The border wars between Olympia and Lacey were fought over neighborhoods that hadn’t been built yet. Southeast Olympia was mostly rural then, Douglas fir stands and open fields. Lacey’s pull toward car-centric commercial space shaped how that land eventually developed, and when we did build houses out here, we built suburbs.

One of the most precise definitions of Lacey I’ve ever heard is that it’s “whatever Olympia isn’t,” and that rings true.

If Olympia is defined by its downtown, then Lacey is the big-box brother, defined by its birth by Blume. The gravity well of Lacey’s car-based commercial development warped the expansion east of Olympia, and what grew out of that is probably our biggest planning mistake.

Dead Space Problem (a poem)

June 13, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I had a busy week this week, so I am going to do something different. I am going to give you a poem I wrote that will be part of a collection I release at the end of the year. Speaking of which, you can buy my collection from last year for $5.

Dead Space Problem is inspired by a debate up in Seattle whether to subdivide unused portions (as in no graves) of a cemetery to build housing. I’m sure even the Yimby-est among us can see how that went sideways.

1. Character

They wanted to build housing on a cemetery parcel. Technically, subdividing the cemetery parcel in a neighborhood so a new parcel could be made on which housing will be built.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the start of a story about houses being built over dead bodies. They are sure this isn’t what’s going on.

But the neighbors are complaining. Not about the dead, but about the character of the place. About the sanctity of the land. The sanctity of the place to be dead in, instead of a place to be alive in.

2. Modest proposal

How making room for the living makes it harder to operate a cemetery. How does a cemetery even make money?

Cemeteries are financial devices. Living off 10 to 15 percent of the original fee to keep the grass mowed and the fences repaired. I’m not sure what the upkeep is, other than what you’d do for your typical lawn.

Eventually, though, the financial devices will fail as inflation and lack of space to expand will catch up with the annuity nature of the cemetery itself. So taxpayers will eventually take over the ancient ritual of warehousing in the dirt boxes of our dead relatives.

We have a space for living bodies problem and a space for dead bodies problem.

Instead, let’s decide if people can live here and there are these places people can live. And there are places where people can’t live. Let’s put our dead bodies in the places where we know we don’t want people to live.

Flood plains, prairies for endangered butterflies, National Monuments and parks.

We already know how to make human bodies into compost.

We should deliver our bodies to the places where we can’t build homes because we want to respect creation. And, financially speaking, we should charge the same fees and 10 to 15 percent will be set aside as an annuity to fund protecting the environment.

Imagine visiting Aunt Claire near the Ape Caves under St. Helens or in the Hoh Rain Forest.

3. Truth

Salmon already do it.

They end their lives and feed the animals that will feed their offspring.

Salmon know it is true.

If Olympia Had Rails

June 6, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

There’s a version of Olympia where you step off the commuter train at 7th Avenue and walk up into daylight at what was an old Greyhound station. You’re already downtown. You wait four minutes for a streetcar, and then 20 minutes later, you’re home. That city was closer to real than you’d think. What killed it wasn’t destiny. It was a series of small, ordinary choices that added up. These are the same choices that killed streetcars and rail mass transit in a lot of places, but we can pull at the threads here and think about what might have been.

The First Hinge: Who Owns the Wire

By the 1920s, the Stevens family had built Olympia’s streetcar system. When they sold their stake to what would eventually become Puget Sound Energy, they handed the city’s transit future to a company that had no real reason to care about it.

A utility company runs streetcars as a side hustle of selling electricity, treating ridership as an afterthought, and when the automobile started pulling riders away in the early 1930s, non-local owners had no particular reason to fight. In September 1933, the company ended the system, and local government stepped in with a motor bus network. The tracks were pulled up or paved over.

Now imagine the Stevens family sells instead to the City of Olympia, or to a proto-PUD, more than a decade before the Thurston PUD was actually formed. A city-owned system doesn’t need to sell electricity. It needs to move people. When ridership falls, it looks to updgrade the noisy, slow and bumpy cars with something new.

With a few more years to hold on, the solution in our real history was the PCC car, introduced in 1936. A consortium of transit operators, facing the same threat from the automobile, had commissioned the most advanced streetcar yet built: rubber-cushioned wheels, streamlined body, a cellular construction that made the ride smoother than anything that had run on rails before. Cities that were still operating when the PCC arrived had a genuine fighting chance. In this version of Olympia, the city’s system is still running and it gets PCC cars.

Building Out: The 1930s Through the 1950s

The original Olympia streetcar network was T-shaped, running east to Central Street and west to Rogers. In the years after the system upgrades to PCC cars, the city keeps building it out.

Puget Street gets a spur north to San Francisco Street in 1939, a short southwest line runs down Decatur to 9th Avenue. Eastside Street also gets a spur, and Division is now the terminus of a westside extension.

This stable era, the 1940s and 1960s, is when the system becomes something people actually count on. But it also ends as the PCC cars age and car-driven growth starts pushing the edges of Olympia. Interstate 5 does come through, but we need something else to save our rail network.

The Second Hinge: Forward Thrust

In the 1960s, Seattle-area voters were asked to approve Forward Thrust, a package of transit bonds that would have funded a regional rail system running on its own dedicated tracks, built with federal matching funds covering roughly 75 cents of every dollar. In real history, voters said no. The money went to Atlanta, which built MARTA. The Pacific Northwest spent the next several decades building highways instead.

In this history, Forward Thrust passes, and the effects pile up.

A regional rail authority forms decades earlier than Sound Transit did in reality, pulling in federal funds at a scale that was simply gone by the time the real Sound Transit came along.

And Boeing-Vertol, which in real history made a troubled attempt at light rail vehicles for Boston and San Francisco, struggling with chronic problems that plagued the cars for years, now has a well-funded local partner involved from the start. The collaboration produces something that works: a vehicle with smooth propulsion, a lightweight aluminum alloy frame, and a modular design that’s actually easy to maintain. The “Seattle-Spec” LRV succeeds in the field tests by early adopters in Olympia and Seattle. By the mid-1970s, transit authorities in Boston, San Francisco, and eventually London and Melbourne are buying American, and the Pacific Northwest has become an unexpected exporter of rail technology.

For Olympia, the immediate consequence is more modest: the city now has access to modern vehicles and a regional system extending south.

The Great Expansion: 1960s Through the 1980s

The 1960s and 1970s are when the system finally grows to match where the city has spread, the eastside line pushing out past Boulevard Road to St. Martin’s University, a new line dropping south down Capitol Way into Tumwater, and two loops filling in what the old spurs couldn’t reach: one connecting Boulevard Road with North Street on the outer eastside, another using 22nd Avenue on the interior southeast side. The Division Street line reaches Evergreen State College. South Puget Sound Community College gets connected via the old Black Lake Road grade.

The most consequential development isn’t a new route, though. It’s political. Lacey, which in real history incorporated as its own city in 1966, instead holds an election to re-annex into Olympia. The streetcar is the promise, and service to Lacey is the condition. Lacey becomes a neighborhood rather than a separate city, and because it never fully separates, it never builds up the political pressure for the kind of sprawl that real-history Lacey ended up with. Growth does occur east of Carpenter Road, clustering around Tanglewilde and Thompson Place, but it stays modest

The 1990s Regional Connection

Just as the regional rail system reaches Fort Lewis, extending south from the original Forward Thrust network through Tacoma and Lakewood, Burlington Northern announces plans to abandon the Fones Road line, nine miles of track cutting through what is now Lacey. In real history, that corridor becomes the Woodland Trail. Here, Thurston County holds a public vote to join the regional transit system and grabs the corridor for rail before it’s gone.

The new commuter line is built similar to regional rail around Chicago or Philadelphia. The new expansion connects to the regional system at Dupont and runs into downtown Olympia, with a station in Lacey placed at roughly where Depot Park sits today. The St. Martin’s streetcar line is extended south to meet the regional line. Downtown, the old 7th Avenue subway tunnel gets converted into an underground station, and you rise from it into daylight at the old Greyhound terminal.

The City

The story is about choices: the Stevens family selling to a utility, Seattle voters rejecting Forward Thrust, Burlington Northern abandoning the line, each one narrowing what the next choice could be.

The Olympia in this history isn’t utopian. I-5 still runs where it runs. Where the streetcar system meets the freeway, expensive bridging projects span the road. The car is still present. But the city has a different shape, denser along the lines, more walkable around the stations, more continuous across what in real history became the Olympia-Lacey seam. You can get from Evergreen to downtown without a car. You can get from downtown to Tacoma without one either.

That city was close. History hinges on small choices that expand with time. That’s what makes it worth imagining, not to mourn a future that didn’t happen, but to understand exactly what was given up, and when, and why.