There is a new tool
available for anyone researching life in Issaquah, doing local genealogy, or
trying to confirm a fact from the past. Thanks to a generous donation from
local philanthropist Skip Rowley, of Rowley Properties, the Issaquah History
Museums have made the full archives of The
Issaquah Press available online, in a format that is both searchable and
free to the user. Interested residents, researchers, and others can view more
than 100 years worth of The Issaquah
Press via an ArchiveInABox website.
The Issaquah Press
started out as The Issaquah
Independent, and its first issue was published on January 18, 1900. The
weekly newspaper played a critical role as observer and recorder of events in
Issaquah and the surrounding area. As Issaquah changed from a booming coal-mine
town to a quiet farming community, and then to a growing suburb of Seattle, The Issaquah
Press captured the stories and images that made Issaquah unique.
Many local businesses, organizations, and individuals can trace important
events in their development through the pages of the Press. When the Press
closed up shop in February 2017, it was universally mourned.
In March 2018, the Seattle
Times donated the full collection of Issaquah Press back issues to
the Issaquah History Museums. Each of the 184 volumes consist of several years
worth of newspapers bound together within a hardbound cover. Each volume is
roughly two feet high and a foot wide. Lacking sufficient space at the Gilman
Town Hall, we rented climate-controlled storage space to accommodate the collection.
Once the back issues
were appropriately stored, staff began planning for a complete digitization. Selected
issues of The Issaquah Press
were digitized by a company called Smalltown Papers in the early 2000s. However,
more than half of the Issaquah Press collection remained inaccessible —
unless the prospective researcher was willing to use an aged microfilm reader
paired with microfilm created in the 1980s.
In December 2018, Skip
Rowley pledged to cover the cost of digitizing the remaining half of
undigitized Press issues. Once the project was funded, Digital Archives
Specialist Kris Ikeda began shipping bound Issaquah Press volumes to a
digitization facility in Frederick, Maryland for processing. Digitization of
the remaining Issaquah Press issues took 8 months, during which time
3,311 editions (consisting of 43,513 pages) were scanned.
Note that a small
percentage of the Issaquah Press remains lost. Issues between 1900 and 1907,
and between 1911 and 1918, are missing, their bound volumes lost sometime
before the Press was microfilmed in the early 1980s. When you’re
researching a particular topic, it can often feel like everything interesting
that ever happened in Issaquah occurred during those gaps. We are always on the
lookout for Issaquah Press issues that fall into these gaps. I try to
keep a half-glass full attitude, and remain grateful for the thousands of
issues, documenting more than 100 years, that do exist.
Ready to dive into
Issaquah’s past? Follow this
link to our ArchiveInABox site, where you can browse, search, and read
through our community’s stories.