Knute Berger

Cascade PBS follows the Washington State Historical Society as they digitize unseen images of Pacific Northwest life from the 1890s to the 1940s.

In the early 1900s, pioneering educator Adelaide Lowry Pollock was the first woman to be named principal of a Seattle grade school. A lifelong love of birds dominated her curriculum. Her students went on birding field trips, mapped birds’ nests, researched bird behaviors, learned bird songs and even built elaborate birdhouses.

In the early 20th century, Sitka spruce, a giant conifer native to the Pacific Northwest, became known as an excellent material for building airplanes. As a result, when the U.S. entered World War I, the demand for that wood exploded.

Born in Seattle’s Japantown, he rose from hardship to build aspirational icons like the Pacific Science Center and the World Trade Center.

The frontiersman’s act, a blend of the sensational and the authentic, helped construct the myth of the West in the country’s collective imagination.

Clams are among the Pacific Northwest’s most vital natural resources. From thousands of years of aquaculture to folk songs and university mascots, the celebration and consumption of clams permeates local food and culture.

During WWII, a movie set designer helped camouflage the factory where B-17 Flying Fortresses were built. Did it work?

In the stormy winter of 1910, an avalanche struck two stalled trains in Wellington, a railroad outpost in Washington’s Central Cascades. Three days later, another one blanketed dozens of rail workers in the Canadian Selkirks.

In 1910, twin tragedies eroded trust in the railway system and over a century later stand as the most fatal ever in Washington and British Columbia.

The death of the whale at a Miami amusement park just before her planned release highlighted the species’ fraught relationship with humans.