Press Release – For Immediate Release
June 12, 2025
The NOHC Board of Directors have declined the City’s offer to purchase the North Olympic History Center property located at 8th and C streets.
Our primary reason is that doing so would require abandoning our artifact storage facility which houses our collection, leaving us with no place to store and protect our inventory of thousands of irreplaceable historical artifacts and archival materials that tell the story of Clallam County.
According to our estimates, it would cost the North Olympic History Center a minimum of $2 million to construct a new curatorial building with the environmental controls, security measures and robust construction requirements needed to meet accepted archival facility standards.[1]
This $2 million estimate does not include — among other things — permitting; design; site preparation; and packing and transporting NOHC’s collection to the new building. The prohibitive cost of such a project is beyond our organizational and financial capacity. Our best — and only — option is to remain where we are and continue our important work serving as a gateway for community engagement with the history of this area.
It is important to clear up some of the misunderstandings about the North Olympic History Center that have been circulating.
Our mission is preserving and sharing the cultural heritage of the North Olympic Peninsula community. We do this by collecting, documenting, and curating thousands of artifacts, archival documents, photographs, oral histories, and pieces of local artwork.
We put our collection in front of the community through traveling exhibits and exhibits with our partners; with free public programs; and site-specific history walks. Our PastPerfect digitization project is making thousands of images from our collection available for free online to people around the world who want to know more about the rich history of this area.[2]
What else do we do to fulfill our mission?
We have taken the lead in Clallam County’s America250 planning.
Since 2018 we have awarded over $5,800 in scholarships to local high school students interested in local history through our Hands on History competition.
We are supporting efforts to Restore the 4 locomotive.
We are hosting a North Olympic Peninsula Historic Preservation Roundtable meeting this summer.
Our Olympic Outdoors exhibit opens at the Port Angeles library with a presentation on the photography of Ray and Roy McClinton, who moved to Port Angeles in the 1890s and captured scenes around the city and in what is now Olympic National Park on Friday, June 20 at 6:30 PM.
Our research library is open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays and our research librarians, some of whom have volunteered at the Center for over 50 years, conduct free research for any member of the public who has a historical request or inquiry. We are also displaying an exhibit of the artwork of Esther Webster in our library, including never-before-seen sketches that we recently digitized and made available for free through our online access site.
We do all of this work with just a single paid employee and two dozen volunteers who logged 500 volunteer hours in the month of May alone – we do a lot with very little.
Our mission does not include rehabilitation, repurposing and restoration of old buildings like Lincoln School. And despite what you might have read, it hasn’t been on our logo for nearly three years.
We would also like to address the suggestion that the North Olympic Center is opposed to housing on the site.
In our most recent meeting with city staff on May 1, we communicated our intent to sell the northern acre of our 2-acre property and use the proceeds to remove the Lincoln School. We were encouraged by City staff’s positive response — they expressed interest in and support for our plan to use our limited power as a seller to contract a developer for a mixed-use project that included housing at the corner of 8th and C streets. We believe this is a best-case outcome — and we understood the City shared our optimism.
The timing and tone of the City’s messaging is troubling.
At no time in recent memory has the City publicly circulated a purchase offer before it was presented to the other party for consideration — no less accompanied the offer with a press release mischaracterizing the North Olympic History Center’s mission and the nature of our conversations.
Our goal is to continue our work preserving and sharing the cultural heritage of the North Olympic Peninsula community. To that end, we would like to invite the public to visit the North Olympic History Center on Wednesday, June 25 from 11 AM to 2 PM for an open house and tour of our facilities to see for yourself that we are so much more than a few old buildings – we are collections we share with the world; the cultural heritage we celebrate; the educational outreach and other programming we provide to the community free of charge. We are our members and volunteers who are deeply passionate and committed to our ongoing mission of encouraging our community to connect with the rich and vibrant history of the Olympic Peninsula.
[1] Our estimate is based on the based on the 2013 Department of Interior Museum Program’s Museum Cost Estimates. This calculates as $350/sq. ft. x 4,500 sq. ft., adjusted for inflation at 38% = $2,181,800.
[2] https://nohc.catalogaccess.com/