Olmstead Place

The panel names the valley for its people and says in one line that they were displaced. Washington State Parks now says more: the farm is a vignette of families who benefited from public land taken from Indigenous people, and the federal survey that opened this ground to private claims was finished in 1869, six years before the Olmsteads rode in over Snoqualmie Pass. The farm went to the state in 1968 from the granddaughters, Leta May and Clareta Olmstead Smith, schoolteachers raised here by their grandparents, who asked that the house and cabin keep their old look.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ginkgo Petrified Forest — 8.6 mi
  A forest of stone logs that never grew together, found by a music teacher and his students in 1932 and left where it lay under cages the CCC built.
• Wanapum Heritage Center — 25 mi
  The River People's own center beside Priest Rapids, where Smohalla taught the Dreamer faith and a band with no treaty and no reservation still lives at its ancestral village.

More markers nearby

• Lava Flows — 0.5 mi
• Beck Memorial — 15 mi