Morning Press: Back to school, farmers market, plankhouse
The Columbian
Published: August 24, 2014, 5:00pm
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Back to school comes with changes, none more exciting than for Crestline Elementary. The Vancouver Farmers Market celebrates a 25-year accumulation of familiar faces. Cathlapotle Plankhouse is not so much a replica as a very recently built example of an antique kind of building. The marijuana business is blooming, and when zoo trains need TLC, they come to Ridgefield.
Warmth may return for this last week of August. Local weather coverage is online here.
Were you away for the weekend? Catch up on some big stories.
In the next 10 days, all K-12 students in Clark County will head back to school for another year of learning. Nowhere is their excitement likely to be more palpable than at Crestline Elementary School in Vancouver.
On Feb. 3, 2013, Crestline students stood across the street and watched as their school was destroyed by flames. Students, parents, teachers and neighbors huddled together that Sunday morning with expressions of disbelief. Some cried. Others hugged. They’d later learn the cause was arson.
As crews rebuilt Crestline, its 500 students and 50 staff were sent to other schools and then got their own temporary school. They became skilled at packing, moving and unpacking.
But now, Crestline staff has unpacked for the last time.
Excitement reverberated through Crestline Elementary on Wednesday as teachers, staff and volunteers unpacked boxes of books, organized classrooms and prepared to open a brand new school.
Music teacher Steve Moebs, 59, stood on the stage, his classroom at the new school, as the volunteers unpacked xylophones and other instruments and placed them in cabinets. In the original Crestline, his music classroom was a double portable with some equipment dating to the school’s opening in 1973. The new music room is a stage engineered for acoustics. A black curtain wraps around to hide the classroom space and turn it into theater space.
“This is our fourth teaching space in less than two years,” said Moebs, who stored boxes of teaching materials at his house last year. “This is the end of the line. Our final unpacking. This is the music room I intend to retire from.”
The fire, though tragic, had a silver lining, he added.
“Out of every tragedy comes a great opportunity,” Moebs said. “Now we can give these kids a state-of-the-art school.”
When the Vancouver Farmers Market opened on Saturday, Aug. 18, 1990 at East Fifth Street and Broadway, about 25 vendors offered produce, flowers and handcrafted items. Entertainment was provided by a steel drum band and an acoustic guitarist.
“People in town were really interested to see what this market was going to be like,” said Madeleine Dulemba, a long-time market board member and the market’s first manager. “We occupied two blocks, from Sixth to Fifth and C Street to Broadway. When I looked at the street at about 10 a.m. opening day, the street was crowded.”
When the market first blossomed, Bruce Hagensen was mayor and Royce Pollard was a city councilor.
“The market was a wonderful start to reclaiming the downtown area,” Hagensen said Saturday. “We’d voted to close the cardrooms. Then the city decided to buy the Lucky Lager brewery property and knock down the old buildings. That started the rebuilding of the park and downtown. That was a significant move for the city.”
For a decade, the market grew in its two-block space next to Interstate 5. But when vacant land used by the market was sold to West Coast Bank, the market had to move. Of 13 potential sites identified, the Esther Short Park site was the first choice of market vendors and board members, Dulemba said.
In April 2000, the market moved four blocks to the western edge of Esther Short Park, on Esther Street between Sixth and Eighth streets. The street was rebuilt to accommodate the market, with water, sewer and power readily available.
“When we started, we envisioned one little part of this street,” former mayor Pollard said. “I don’t think anyone thought we’d have anything as good as this.”
Today the Vancouver Farmers Market is one of the largest outdoor markets in the state.
RIDGEFIELD — The Cathlapotle Plankhouse has been recognized as a leading example of historic preservation.
Built in the centuries-old style of the Chinook people, it is among 30 success stories listed by a federal heritage-advocacy agency. It’s the only site from Washington, Oregon, Idaho or Montana on the list.
Although the plankhouse opened in 2005, don’t think of it as a reproduction, says Sam Robinson, whose ancestors lived at the original Cathlapotle village along the Columbia River.
“It is not a replica plankhouse,” Robinson, acting chairman of the Chinook Nation, noted. “This is the most modern plankhouse.”
The volunteers who built it were able to use some traditional techniques.
“They split planks with old technologies, using wedges,” said Greg Robinson, who is Sam’s cousin. The Chinook artist was the project manager, coordinating volunteers and gathering materials.
“It’s difficult to get a traditional project through federal regulations,” Greg Robinson said, especially when it includes open fire pits inside a wooden structure. “Tribal members are the only people who can have fires.”
In a November 1805 journal entry, William Clark said he counted 14 houses at “Quathlapotle nation” as his group paddled west toward the Pacific Ocean. The community was home to an estimated 900 people.
TACOMA — Under the massive, round roof of the Tacoma Dome, a button-down crowd from across the state gathered last weekend for CannaCon, billed by its organizer as the largest cannabis business conference in the nation.
While tourists and marijuana enthusiasts descended on Seattle’s more lighthearted Hempfest, this much smaller group was on a serious mission — learning how to cash in on the slow but growing legitimization of the legal cannabis industry in Washington. Pot smoking was not allowed. Instead of the music, celebrations and speeches going on in Seattle, the event was peppered with a wide range of seminars, entrepreneurial product vendors, growers, lawyers, insurance agents, accountants and even a group trying to set up a marijuana commodities exchange.
In the middle of all that action, a new business group, the Marijuana Business Association, worked to round more people into its fold. The Seattle-based group has opened a handful of offices around the state and plans to open one in Vancouver on Sept. 19th, said CEO Dave Rheins.
“Despite all the challenges, this industry is being built,” said Rheins, looking out at the wide array of booths. “This culture isn’t new, the product’s not new, but what is new is the whole business side. And we have a lot of education to do.”
What’s new is legitimization of a long-stigmatized product. It’s a new industry, with Washington and Colorado as test cases for legalization. Rheins notes that it will take a bit of time for the market to sort out — and weed the bad businesspeople from the good ones.
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RIDGEFIELD — Two heavyweight attractions from the Oregon Zoo are spending the summer in Ridgefield.
It’s not a wildlife-refuge vacation for a couple of elephants or a pair of giraffes … although that would be pretty interesting. Two engines from the zoo’s railroad are being refurbished at a business along Interstate 5.
Pacific Power Group is restoring two iconic pieces of zoo history — the Old West-inspired Centennial steam locomotive and the retro-futuristic Zooliner.
The four-month restoration project is part of the Oregon Zoo’s railroad shutdown, as crews lay track and build a 20-foot-high trestle for a new train route.
The sleek Zooliner is being outfitted with a new 174-horsepower diesel engine featuring improved emission control and better fuel economy. It’s also undergoing extensive body work to repair decades of corrosion and general wear and tear.
Technicians in the body shop have worked their way through seven layers of paint while refurbishing the Zooliner.
The oil-fueled steam engine’s summer to-do list included pressure testing and installation of a new smoke box. Workers also are replacing the steel-frame carriage on the locomotive’s tender car, which accompanied the locomotive to Ridgefield aboard a 52-foot-long flatbed trailer in June.
