OLYMPIA — Inspired by South Carolina pulling the Confederate flag from the front of its statehouse last year, an effort by state lawmakers to remove a symbol of slavery passed the House unanimously Monday.
House Joint memorial 4010, which now heads to the Senate for consideration, would name State Route 99 after black Civil War veteran William P. Stewart of Snohomish. Stewart fought for the Union in an infantry unit comprising black men, according to the bill.
Markers that were positioned along what used to be State Route 99 near Blaine and Vancouver once honored Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
The highway currently has no official name and the markers, blessed by state officials in 1940, have since been taken down. But Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, said it’s still an important gesture to rechristen the highway.
Local Angle: Marker part of memorial along I-5
For decades, a large granite marker designating state Highway 99 as the Jefferson Davis Highway sat on the grass strip in front of the historic Covington House at 42nd and Main streets. It was quietly removed by the city in 1997 or 1998.
Its absence went largely unnoticed until 2002, when a legislative proposal to remove the markers from either end of the old highway revealed Vancouver’s had already been banished to a shed at the city’s Park Hill Cemetery.
After an outcry, it was relocated to the lawn of the Clark County Historical Museum, but was removed in 2006 due to construction of an elevator on that spot.
Since 2008, it has been part of the Jefferson Davis Memorial, a small privately owned parcel of land along Interstate 5 southbound south of the Gee Creek rest area. Confederate flags are also flown there.
— The Columbian
“I think it’s a statement about our values, as opposed to what they were in 1941 at the height of the Jim Crow era,” Dunshee said after the vote.
Dunshee first tried to name the highway after Stewart in 2002. He said a previous effort never cleared the Senate, which in 2002 was controlled by Democrats. When South Carolina removed the flag in July following the killings of nine black church members during a Bible study in Charleston, Dunshee said it was time to try again.
The markers now sit in Jefferson Davis Park next to Interstate 5 near Ridgefield, according to the private park’s website. State Route 99 was the major north-south route through Western Washington before I-5 opened in the 1960s. Many parts of State Route 99 were replaced by I-5.
