The Ellisport Women’s Club called a meeting of island pioneers on May 19, 1923, and over 100 islanders came to the home of Miss Ella Caughey, where they crowded into the living room with its cheerful open fire providing relief from the cool and cloudy early spring day. Blanche Hedman was elected chair, and she read the proposal for forming a Vashon-Maury Island Pioneer and Historical Society. The proposal read: “The purposes for which we, the pioneers of Vashon-Maury Island have assembled is to form an historical society, its object being to secure and to preserve authentic and reliable data pertaining to the early history of the island and its pioneer settlers; and to establish an annual holiday to be known as Pioneer Day to be celebrated and perpetuated by the people of the island in honor and in memory of its pioneers.”
The first Pioneer Picnic was held on June 14, 1924, at the Odd Fellows Hall (now the Blue Heron), and at that meeting a committee was appointed to work with the Daughters of the American Revolution to develop a monument to the pioneers of Vashon Island. In true Vashon fashion, the Pioneer Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution soon parted ways over disputes about the monument, and the Pioneer Society continued the effort alone. The ceremony to dedicate the monument was held on Nov. 11, 1927, at Pioneer Square near the Quartermaster Dock. Judge C.E. Claypost gave the address; the Vashon Island Male Chorus sang the song “America,” and the over 100 people assembled participated in a responsive reading before the monument was unveiled by Charlotte Sherman Newman and Harriet Fuller.
Eight-year-old Gene Sherman was at that ceremony in 1927, and was there this past weekend on Nov. 11, 2017, at the 90th anniversary of the original dedication and unveiling of the Pioneer Monument. He unveiled the monument in a recreation of the original ceremony sponsored by the Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum. Jim Sherman and Brian Brenno organized the event, and they power washed the moss-encrusted monument to restore it to its original look. Nearly 50 islanders gathered to recreate the original ceremony. Historian Bruce Haulman introduced the ceremony; Reverend Joe Kutze gave the invocation and dedicatory prayers; Michael Shook sang the third verse of “America the Beautiful” with those gathered joining in to sing the first verse, and Brian Brenno, vice-president of the Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum board, gave a short address highlighting some of the early American settlers’ accounts of coming to the island. Gene Sherman then unveiled the monument, which was draped in an American flag, concluding the event.
The formation of the Vashon-Maury Island Pioneer and Historical Society in 1923 was the result of two forces at work on Vashon at that time. Many of the early settlers, who came in the 1870s and 1880s when they were young women and men, were into their 60s and 70s and were beginning to fade with the ravages of time. The daughters and sons of these early pioneers were interested in preserving the memory of their parents and saw this organization as a way to capture and celebrate their accomplishments. At the same time, the Puyallup Tribe and the descendants of the sxwobabc (Shebabs) First People of Vashon were bringing a suit in the U.S. Court of Claims, contesting the terms of the Medicine Creek Treaty and seeking redress for the loss of their lands. This effort resulted in the 1927 Land Claims trial and Lucy Gerand’s testimony about the eight sxwobabc villages around Quartermaster Harbor. For settlers who had taken up homesteads on this land, the native people’s land claims were a potential threat to their land titles.
As a result of the loss of the first generation of settlers and a potential threat to land titles, Vashon islanders in the 1920s were eager to celebrate the past and to honor the accomplishments of those first pioneers on Vashon.
— Bruce Haulman is an island historian and Terry Donnelly is an island photographer.
