October & November Display Featuring:
Fiber Arts
Explore the 19th Annual North Olympic Fiber Arts Festival "Sublime Marvel – Splendor, Enterprise, & Awe".
Many fiber artists and fiber arts advocates have displayed their passion and artistry. Artists include Lora Armstrong, Aaron Asselin, Renne Emiko Brock, Jordan Carter, Caroline Evergreen, Liisa Fagerlund, Mary Lou Giacomelli, Lynn Gilles, Jennifer Harris, Estelle Jackson, Connie McGuire, Robin Nelson, Sew `n Sews, Marla Varner, Prabha Werner, and Jean Wyatt.
Sequim Museum & Arts is one of Washington State's preeminent historical, cultural, and community institutions. Since its founding in 1976, the Museum has advanced its regional mission to collect, preserve, and display artifacts and information about human and natural history through a wide-ranging program of research, education, and exhibition. The museum is renowned for its local exhibitions and historical collections, which portray a panorama of the area's diverse economic, cultural, and social development. Designated a
BLUE STAR MUSEUM
by the National Endowment for the Arts, the admission-free Museum is acclaimed the finest community-supported museum of its kind in western Washington and featured by nationally advertised
AMERICAN CRUISE LINES as a sight-seeing tour to passengers visiting nearby Port Angeles.
The institution's ALL VOLUNTEER STAFF maintain a captivating collection of exhibits and displays that chronicle the history of the Sequim-Dungeness area in a 6,000 sq. foot
"RED BARN"
across the street from Sequim High School.
Completed in 2019, at 544 N. Sequim Avenue, the unique exhibit center bears the honor of being the only museum built in Clallam County in over 40 years.
However, one of the museum’s monumental artifacts is the
OLD DUNGENESS SCHOOLHOUSE, a National Registered Historical place located five miles north of the museum at 2781 Towne Road. Built in 1892 next to the Dungeness River, the stately two-story structure represents the best example of a BELL-TOWERED schoolhouse in the county and is available for rental and guided tours.
Private donations and community support enable the museum to document and preserve the cultural history of the indigenous residents and pioneers in the Sequim-Dungeness community with a growing variety of delightful displays, artifacts, and unique exhibits. These include
13,000-year-old Mastodon tusks, a 1907 REO automobile and 1936 AUTOCAR hauler, (Autocar is the oldest surviving motor vehicle brand in the
Western Hemisphere), and the remarkable Journey Through Time exhibit where visitors take a chronological and archaeological stroll through Sequim Prairie as the area was originally called by pioneers. The exhibit, created by former museum director Katherine Vollenwieder, outlines the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal settlement, early Spanish-English exploration, and subsequent shipping, fishing, logging, railroading, irrigation, and agricultural histories.
"The Boys In the Boat" exhibit, named after the bestselling book by Daniel James Brown, honors Sequim's
Joe Rantz, one of the nine University of Washington
Gold Medalist rowers at the 1936 Olympics
in Nazi Germany. Also displayed are 42-foot and 62-foot Western Red Cedar racing shells built by George Pocock, who made racing shells for the victorious American rowing team.
Another exhibit features Sequim resident
Matt Dryke,
skeet shooter Gold Medalist
in the 1984 Summer Olympics, who also won gold medals at the 1983 and 1987 Pan American Games, as well as two World and nine U.S. championships with the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit.
The museum's dedicated volunteers and supporters sponsor and participate in a medley of events, activities, and programs including history presentations, a Tractor Parade, art exhibitions in the museum's
Judith McInnes Tozzer Art Gallery, and annual Sequim Irrigation Festival, Washington State's oldest community festival.
The ADMISSION-FREE museum is currently open Wednesday through Saturday from
11 a.m. to 4pm. Call 1-360-681-2257 or visit www.SequimMuseum.com for seasonal changes.
Seattle Times interview with Museum Executive Director
By Benjamin Cassidy
At the local history museum, a swell of visitors checked out a wall devoted to the University of Washington rowing team that won gold at the 1936 Olympics. And at the high school across the street, students, teachers and administrators celebrated the realization of an unlikely bid to bring a Hollywood film screening to the Olympic Peninsula.
In this Clallam County city of 8,000, the story of rower Joe Rantz, a local legend and a member of the “The Boys in the Boat” UW team that won the ‘36 Olympics, has never been more top of mind.
George Clooney didn’t make the journey from Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula for the Tribute to Joe Rantz. And his film doesn’t depict Rantz’s difficult early years in Sequim, though the character does talk about it. (It does, in something of an upset, pronounce the city’s name correctly.) But the movie has provided local aficionados with an opportunity to further ingrain Rantz’s inspirational story in Sequim’s consciousness and, in turn, encourage the community to continue facing one of its somber realities.
As Brown details in one of the book’s early chapters, the Spokane-born Rantz arrived in Sequim with his family in 1925. He worked at his father’s auto and tire shop on Washington Street and met a girl, Joyce Simdars, he’d later marry. But shortly after Wall Street crashed in fall 1929, Rantz’s father and stepmother moved away from the struggling farming community with his half siblings, leaving Rantz to fend for himself in an unfinished home.
In the ensuing months, the teenager foraged to survive, netting salmon and gathering berries, while performing odd jobs and maintaining good grades at Sequim High School. Eventually, in 1931, he moved to Seattle to live with his brother, Fred, and finish his high school career at Roosevelt High, where UW varsity coach Al Ulbrickson first spotted the frame of a rower who would become one of the school’s storied gold medalists at the 1936 Olympics in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
To chronicle Rantz’s years in Sequim, Brown drew from Rantz’s memory as well as research from locals that was passed along to Judy Rantz Willman, one of Rantz’s children. Judy Stipe, then a board member of the Sequim Museum & Arts and now its executive director, couldn’t have known that the newspaper clippings she and others dug up would help inform part of a bestseller. She still “can’t even get over” the story’s ties to Sequim. “I’m just so proud,” she said.
Today, in a red barnlike structure on North Sequim Avenue that displays mastodon bones from nearly 14,000 years ago at its center, visitors to Sequim Museum & Arts often head for a nearby wall behind a life-size cutout of the UW rowing team. There, everything from ship tickets to race photos to Rantz’s UW ID card offer a visual timeline of the squad’s journey to glory. The exhibit includes footage of the race and the original radio broadcast, a call that still thrills and chills. Stipe noted that there’s been an uptick in visitors since the announcement of the movie, which could help the free all-volunteer museum receive grants in the future. “The response has been simply phenomenal,” Stipe said.
At Sequim Museum & Arts she keeps copies of the book for visitors to purchase. She buys them in bulk for a small amount and only sells them for a little more. “My goal is to put those books in every single kid’s hands,” she said. “I don’t care about making money off of them, even though the museum could use it. I want every kid that I see to have one of those books.”
He's "The Boy in the Boat" who's the heart of both the bestselling book - and the upcoming movie directed by George Clooney.
“Historically he's a hero. He's a darn hero,” said Judy Stipe, executive director of Sequim Museum and Arts. This local history museum has a permanent display dedicated to Joe Rantz, Sequim’s hometown hero who was abandoned by his parents, then went on to become a rower for the University of Washington, eventually rowing on the boat that would win gold for the USA in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
Volunteers at this museum even helped author Daniel James Brown research his book.
"We went into the old newspapers old annuals, and we found everything we could,” Stipe said.
Easy enough in a small town - Rantz attended high school in this building right across the street from the museum before going to the University of Washington and making crew, then making history.
At the museum you can see Joe Rantz memorabilia, watch a film of his Olympic crew racing in Berlin, you can even listen to the actual radio broadcast of the race while settled into the museum's replica 1930's living room. Also, drop by at the right time and you may catch volunteers working to restore an 8 person 60 foot cedar shell built by George Pocock in 1953, the famed craftsman who built winning racing shells inside the UW Crew House.
Beyond the museum exhibit, there are few visible nods to Rantz’s legacy in Sequim. Signage along Highway 101 states the city’s home to
Olympic gold medalists Rantz and skeet shooter Matt Dryke. Rantz’s ashes are in a family niche at Sequim View Cemetery.
“The Boys in the Boat” around Seattle, Director George Clooney joins author Daniel James Brown and Judy Rantz Willman, daughter of gold-medal-winning rower Joe Rantz, to celebrate the Seattle premiere of the film "The Boys in the Boat."
'The Boys of '36' documentary tells you more about the enduring pull of ‘The Boys in the Boat’ in Sequim, and how 'The Boys in the Boat' and Lessons in Chemistry' inspired a Seattle mom to row.
"A Tribute to Joe Rantz" takes place Friday Dec. 8th at 3:45 with a screening of the movie "The Boys in the Boat" and a dinner celebration at Sequim Museum and Arts following the screening.
KING 5's Evening celebrates the Northwest. Contact us: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email.