We all have memories of our school days. There is often a particular instructor, a circle of friends, lessons learned, a particular sporting event, and other moments in time that we recall. We tend to organize our memories of our youth by recalling that something happened when we were in sixth grade or in high school. The story of schools, however, is also about school districts, buildings, policies, teachers, etc. These topics may be less personal, but the framework within which the other memories reside.

This site is an attempt to tell the story of education and its participants in the Yelm school district. For the historian there are articles, essays and pictures. For people looking for their family there are lists of teachers, student pictures from annuals and newspaper articles. For residents of Yelm whose family may have shown up at a Yelm school from the 1860s to the 1960s, there may a great grandparent at Yelm High School. For teachers and educators there are documents and policies reflecting the changes and the seemingly eternal issues confronting schools and education. This site is also about the numerous small schools which existed in and around Yelm. Slowly over the years these districts combined to form the modern Yelm Community Schools District.

This project grew out of the Yelm History Project. After a broad examination of the town’s story, we decided to explore a narrower aspect of Yelm history, the story of schools. Most of the documents presented here can be located at the state archive in Olympia. The Story of Yelm provided the first written survey of education in the area and was a starting point for subsequent Students from a number of eras in the Yelm education story have also contributed their stories and, often, their pictures. The Nisqually Valley News, found on microfilm at the Washington State library, has yielded numerous stories about education on the prairie. Newspapers from Olympia also contained articles which more fully defined education in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Yelm High School library was the source of an endless supply of yearbooks which yielded wonderful pictures (not the highest quality) of scenes from high school life. Similarly, scrapbooks organized by high school historians over the years helped recapture the past. Unless otherwise attributed, all text is by Ed Bergh.

This story is incomplete. We have a gone a long way to detailing a tremendous amount of information and over the years it is our hope to more fully tell the story of the schools and their inhabitants.

Special Thanks

I want to personally thank some of those who have helped make this site happen. From Yelm Community Schools, thanks go to Lois Baker and Alan Burke for providing encouragement and assistance, as well as allowing me to bombard them with and endless stream of rough drafts and pictures that they just had to “check out.” The ladies at the Washington State Archives also were of great assistance directing me to collections of documents pertaining to school districts in Thurston County. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Cory Clark, a student in one of my classes who offered to help construct this site as an independent study. Together, for nearly a year, we worked on this project. He would take the writings, pictures, and documents and formatted them electronically. His ability to patiently add “updated” versions of some story was remarkable. It has been a pleasure to work with him. A final word of thanks to my son Mason who showed me how to edit existing web-ready pages, then showed me again once I had forgotten how.

Thank you and enjoy the site,

Ed Bergh Jr.
Social Studies Teacher
Yelm High School
1974-?
berghed@netscape.net