ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Friday, January 10, 2014 • tacomaweekly.com • Section B • Page 3
serves up a buffet of local histories PUYALLUP Ruth Anderson, coauthor of “Puyallup, Pioneer Paradise,� worked with Hans Zeiger, Sarah Beals and members of the historical societies of Puyallup, Orting, Sumner and South Hill, along with staffs from the Puyallup Public Library and Karshner Museum, for a second book about Puyallup that focuses on the people who made the city in the shadow of Mount Rainier. The “Legendary Locals� chronicles the area’s tribal history as well as its pioneers, notable business owners and noted residents, including a group of farmers who gathered in the summer in 1900 that grew annually to be the Washington State Fair.
Now people at least marginally interested in the past can learn about their communities without investing a lot of research time in file folders and decaying newspapers.
GIG HARBOR UNIVERSITY PLACE Another suburban history worth looking at is “University Place,� by Arne Handeland. The obvious question of its name without the benefit of an actual university within its borders is explained along with snapshots and news items about the farms and estates that dotted the waterfront area’s hillsides. The book includes photographs from the archives of University Place Historical Society, University Place
School District, Tacoma Public Library and personal albums. For the record, University Place was named because the once rural area was selected as a site for the future University of Puget Sound. Plans were drawn up in the 1890s but fates intervened and the campus was located closer to Tacoma’s downtown. The university never broke ground, but the name stuck.
Donald R. Tjossem pieced together a “Gig Harbor� book that proves more interesting than first thought as it shows the fits and starts of the growing Pierce County community as a safe harbor for Charles Wilkes’ expedition through the area in 1841 and its rise as a fishing port. Big changes to the area came with the construction of the Narrows Bridge that made it a bedroom community to the more urbanized regions of the Sound.
That growth spurt was stunted when the bridge collapsed within a year of construction and then took a decade to replace. Tjossem, a local writer and historian, gathered photographs from the Harbor History Museum,
Tacoma Public Library, Washington State Historical Society and Museum of History and Industry as well as neverbefore-published images from private collections to bring the growth of Gig Harbor to life.
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