Digital Archives

Happy Friday to all the students across Washington who have their noses back in the books! Need a real quick study break? Here, St. Martin’s students enjoy a break from all those books - back in 1965.

It's that time of year when students are cracking open their text books ... and that means high school football is starting all over the state. Check out a flash back from 80 years ago, when the Olympia Bears hosted the Vancouver Trappers on Thanksgiving Day in 1929. The teams are seen playing on Stevens Field, since Olympia High School, then located across the street from the state capitol building, had no field of its own. The game’s final score: 14-0 Bears.

The rap sheets of inmates who were admitted into the state’s first Reformatory in the early 1900s are now available on the Web for (drumroll, please) free. You can go to http://digitalarchives.wa.gov/, look under the institution record series, and sift through inmate files of those who were admitted into the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, where they were taught skills and training like tailoring and barbering so that someday they could re-enter society. Pictured here is an example of what you can find: This blue-eyed,

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... The Washington State Archives was used to crack an unsolved mystery here at the State Capitol.

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