Olmstead Place Historical State Park History

“…they topped the last hill and saw the abundance nature had spread before them. The rich grass lands, the creeks lined with wild berries and willows, the meadows sweet with wild flowers, unlimited pasture on the low hills, the splendor of the mountains with the blue evergreens promising timber….”                                                           

--Clareta Olmstead Smith, The Trail Leads West

Clareta Olmstead Smith’s description of a traveler beholding the Kittitas Valley is experienced by anyone coming to visit the park founded by her family’s generosity. The wide, flat valley is a product of tectonic folding of the landscape that created a basin at the valley’s heart and a massive gravel fill left by meltwaters from Ice Age glaciers that flowed from the heights of the Cascade Mountains.

Olmstead Place Historical State Park is a well-preserved vignette of the history and lifestyle of Kittitas Valley families that benefitted from the opportunity to acquire public domain lands taken from Indigenous people in the 1800s.

Indigenous Lands

Olmstead Place lies within the traditional territory of Sahaptin and Interior Salish language speaking Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

The Kittitas Valley’s broad expanse of shrub-steppe and natural grasslands affords rich sources of plant foods such as cous and berries for collection, and grazing lands for the large horse herds typical of the communities that made homes in the valley for centuries. Indigenous stewardship supported sustainable hunting and harvesting on the land.

Ancestors of today’s Yakama and Colville tribal members traditionally followed a seasonal round throughout areas of central Washington, maximizing the harvesting of necessary resources by arriving in each ecosystem at the peak time for obtaining the plants and animals they needed. Historically, Interior Salish villages near today’s Olmstead Place Historical State Park provided a home base in May and June for root digging.

Four major transportation routes with use from ancient times intersected in the Kittitas Valley:

• Snoqualmie Pass Trail—a seasonal route to Coast Salish communities on today’s Puget Sound (now Interstate 90)
• Shushuskin Trail—a route connecting the fertile valleys of the foothills of the Cascades south toward the Yakima Valley (now Umtanum/Wenas County Roads)
• Colockum Pass Trail—a path north to fishing stations on the Wenatchee and Columbia Rivers (now Colockum Pass Road through the Naneum Ridge State Forest and Colockum Wildlife Area)
• Squaw Creek Trail—a well-used route which passed near the Olmstead homestead; it became the primary access route between the Kittitas Valley and steamboat or rail transportation at The Dalles on the Columbia River. (Now Interstate 82/US 97--NOTE: the namesake watercourse along this trail was renamed “Lmuma Creek” to eliminate the perpetuation of a derogatory term)

When fur trader Alexander Ross visited the Kittitas Valley in 1814, he wrote that:

“This mammoth camp could not have contained less than 3,000 men, exclusive of women and children, and treble that number of horses. It was a grand and imposing sight in the wilderness, covering more than six miles in every direction. Councils, root gathering, hunting, horse-racing, foot-racing, gambling, singing, dancing, drumming, yelling, and a thousand other things which I cannot mention, were going on around us.”

Chief Owhi and his son Qualchan rose to leadership roles amongst the Indigenous people of the Kittitas Valley in the mid-1800s just as huge impacts to traditional lifeways began. In December 1847, Owhi visited Fort Walla Walla to request missionaries to be sent to the Kittitas Valley to teach area residents about agricultural methods. Missionaries built a one-room mission at Manastash Creek in July 1848, headed by Father Pandosy, but the project was abandoned by September 1849.

The Yakama War

Representatives of numerous Indigenous peoples with traditional territories in what is now central and eastern Washington negotiated and signed treaties with Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens at Walla Walla on June 9, 1855. Owhi was one of 14 Indigenous signatories to the Yakama Treaty of Camp Stevens. The treaties were not ratified by the US Senate until 1859, and in the interim, the benefits promised by the treaties were not available to the tribes that had signed.

The discovery of gold in the Colville area during this period resulted in numerous Euro-American prospectors entering the as-yet-unceded Indigenous land, sometimes coming into conflict with residents. A government agent sent to investigate the incidents, Andrew Bolon, was killed by Indigenous warriors.

In response, the US Army unsuccessfully sent soldiers into the area to apprehend those involved, initiating what came to be known as the Yakama War. After several skirmishes and a widening of the conflict into the Puget Sound area, Colonel George Wright was ordered to “attack All the hostile Indians you meet, with vigor; make their punishment severe and persevere until the submission of all is complete.”

Armed with new, highly accurate rifles, Colonel Wright’s forces decisively defeated the allied tribes at the Battle of Spokane Plains on September 5, 1858.

In the days following the battle, Colonel Wright ordered the destruction of the Indigenous peoples’ food stores, nearly 1,000 horses and their dwellings. The atrocities culminated in the summary execution of Qualchan on September 24, 1858. His father, Owhi, was killed as he attempted to escape custody while being transported to Fort Walla Walla a few days later.

Land Disposal

The US Government Survey of the area around today’s Olmstead Place Historical State Park was completed in 1869, opening the way for private ownership of the public domain lands. Following the pattern for surveying public domain lands of the United States established by the Land Ordinance of 1785, the surveyed lands were divided into one-square-mile (640 acres) units called “sections” grouped into 36-square-mile units called “townships.” The township that surrounds Olmstead Place was designated as “Township 17 North, Range 19 East, Willamette Meridian” by the survey.

The land in this township was distributed by the US General Land Office to people that qualified to receive it under terms of land disposal laws passed by the US Congress.

• 19% of the land was sold directly to individuals with the means to buy it at a cost of $1.25 per acre under terms of the Land Act of 1820. Another 1% was granted to military veterans with service before 1855.
• 28% of the land, including the Olmstead homestead, was “proved up” under terms of the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave title to up to 160 acres of land to anyone who cultivated some of their claim, built a residence and lived on the site for at least five years. Another 9% of the land was claimed, in larger allotments, by persons who developed irrigated agriculture on their properties.
• 6% of the land was granted to the State of Washington at statehood in 1889 for the support of public institutions such as schools and universities.
• A whopping 37% of the land was granted to the Northern Pacific Railway, part of a grant of millions of acres to subsidize construction of rail lines into the western states.

The Olmsteads

Samuel Bedient Olmstead was born in 1831 in New York. When he was 18 years old, he left home to join the California gold rush. Though the hoped-for riches didn’t pan out, he did gain a lasting appreciation for the natural beauty of the western territories. He returned to his family’s new home in Illinois in 1861, where he married Sarah Yale. He enlisted in the Illinois Infantry, serving in the US Civil War both with that unit and later with Company D, 1st Minnesota Volunteers, Heavy Artillery, stationed in Chattanooga, TN from September 1864 to September 1865. His regiment lost 87 members to disease, but none to combat fatalities. Health complications from his Civil War service would plague Samuel for the rest of his life. Samuel and Sarah had two children, Clara and Philip, during the war years.

A few years after his military service ended, the family boarded the newly completed transcontinental railroad line to travel to a new home in the west, hoping to find relief for Samuel’s medical issues. Along the way, a third child, Jack, was born. They eventually landed with relatives in Seattle. The wet climate there did not alleviate his condition, so in 1875 the family traveled by horseback across the Snoqualmie Pass Trail to the Kittitas Valley, hoping for a better climate in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains. The Olmsteads filed a homestead claim on 160 acres of land that included a stretch of Coleman (Altapes) Creek, adjacent to the Squaw Creek Trail.

To build their home, giant cottonwood trees were felled on the banks of the Yakima River 20 miles away, hauled to their claim, squared with an adze, dovetailed at the corners and joined with round pegs fashioned from the trees’ branches to complete a cozy cabin. Lumber for the roof, ceiling and floor was purchased from a mill at nearby Naneum Creek. Sandstone for the hearth was quarried near Thrall, about four miles southeast of the site.

Sarah supplemented their income by working for Samuel’s half-brother John at his trading post two miles away. The three children all shared in the tasks of developing the farm. Crops included wheat, vegetables such as corn, peas and rhubarb, and fruits such as apples, cherries, pears and mulberries.

Before mechanical threshers were introduced, local families would labor together to harvest each family’s wheat crop. They shared meals and chores as they moved from farm to farm with shared equipment to thresh the grain.

Samuel succumbed to liver disease related to his service injuries about six years after they arrived, but Sarah and her children persevered, building a successful Jersey dairy farm, serving customers from Kittitas County to Seattle once the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed in 1886.

Clara married and had two daughters, Leta May and Clareta, but died during an influenza epidemic when the girls were 2 and 3 years old. Sarah raised her granddaughters; her sons gradually assumed responsibility for the farm. Neither son ever married.

Additional structures were built to facilitate the farm’s operation, including a barn and granary (1892), wagon shed (1894) and eventually a larger house with modern conveniences like running water and electricity (1908). Sarah Olmstead died in 1918 at age 76, having also outlived her son Jack, who had died from typhoid fever in 1907. Philip died in 1938.

Upon the passing of their Uncle Philip, Leta May and Clareta Smith left their teaching careers and returned to run the farm for the rest of their lives. Neither woman ever married.

Making a Park

With no heirs and a desire for their family farm to become an enduring testament to the history of pioneer farms in Washington, Leta May and Clareta Smith donated their 217-acre property to the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) on September 11, 1968, retaining a life estate to continue residing on the property. Leta May passed in 1974; Clareta died in 1981 at the age of 91.

The National Park Service approved the listing of the property to the National Register of Historic Places on March 31, 1971. While the Smith sisters remained in residence park staff focused on basic maintenance of the property. The original Olmstead cabin was opened for public tours, and the hay barns were reconstructed in 1976 with a traditional barn-raising bee.

In 1980, the historic Seaton Cabin schoolhouse was moved onto the property for preservation and exhibit. In accordance with the Smith sisters’ wishes, parts of the property were leased to area farmers with the stipulation that farming on the 50 acres to the east of Coleman Creek be farmed only by traditional horse-drawn methods, maintaining the historic integrity to the delight of park visitors.

The historical significance of Olmstead Place is not specific to the Olmstead family or any events in this geographic location. Its importance lies in the representative exhibition of a well-preserved homestead-era family farm. The Olmstead Place story encompasses federal government policies that took land from Indigenous people and redistributed it to European-American colonists that fostered the growth and integration of Washington into the United States.

Volunteer groups have lovingly maintained the Olmstead Place gardens, and the perpetuation of traditional planting and harvesting techniques have aimed to preserve the opportunity to better understand the lives of farming families during the late 19th and early 20th century in the Kittitas Valley.