Family Ties: All can relate to Skagit historical museum exhibit

The Skagit County Historical Museum in La Conner has always been a family friendly place.

And never more so than in its Golden Anniversary year.

A new museum exhibit highlights the many contributions to Skagit history made by the Peth and Guillen families, along with the lasting impact of key figures Wallie Funk, Dick Fallis, Pete Campbell and Edna Breazeale.

The new sidebar display nicely complements an ongoing celebration of the museum’s 50 years preserving and promoting Skagit culture and traditions.

“These families and individuals represent the many people who helped make the museum what it is today,” says award-winning curator and Pioneer Association Immediate Past President Karen Summers.

Subjects were chosen for the exhibit based on specific criteria including roles played in the museum’s founding, donations to its collections and contributions to the Skagit region’s quality of life.

Summers can recite without benefit of notes the unique and varied features of each of the showcased families and personalities.

They do share one common trait, however.

“For me,” Summers explains, “they all care about Skagit history.”

The Peth family, she says, represents Skagit County’s homesteading and ranching heritage.

“There are so many wonderful farming families in Skagit County,” Summers stresses, “and the Peth family embodies that through and through.”

The Peth display outlines the family’s journey from its Wisconsin roots to raising oats and hay for the U.S. Cavalry station at Fort Lewis to the legendary rodeo career of Hall of Famer Wick Peth.

And much more.

Summers points out that George Peth served as Master of Ceremonies when the museum was formally opened.

“Their input and dedication to the history of Skagit County,” Summers says of the Peths, “is built into every wall of this institution.”

The Guillens, she notes, emerged as leaders in the Skagit art community as well as champions of local labor and social justice movements.

Jesus Guillen, says Summers, had a rare talent for thematic illustration, finding elegance in the daily toil undertaken by farm workers harvesting Skagit Valley’s agricultural bounty.

The Guillen family was instrumental in helping the museum recognize the need to permanently display the diverse history of the Latino community, leading to its critically acclaimed Voces Del Valle exhibit.

Pete Campbell was a longtime Skagit tribal leader who also ministered in Concrete and who provides keen insight into what it was like to travel the Skagit River by canoe around the turn of the 20th century. His family would ultimately donate more than 50 valued artifacts, including cedar baskets, tools and written histories to the museum.

The stewardship of those items allows the museum staff to preserve Skagit history “for all people, for all time.”

Fallis and Funk parlayed careers in journalism into opportunities to tell the stories of Skagit Valley through ink and photography.

Fallis was a schoolteacher who in 1973 purchased the Puget Sound Mail in La Conner and later made his mark as the Pioneer Association’s long tenured Historian/Memorialist, receiving the museum’s Heritage Award in 2003.

In his papers in Anacortes and then Oak Harbor, Funk chronicled the lives of Skagit artists, fishermen, dock workers and athletes while promoting through his editorials a commitment to both historic preservation and an enlightened vision of the future.

Breazeale was a true pioneer in the cause of Skagit conservation. Her family gifted the land upon which the interpretive center at Padilla Bay that bears their name was developed.

She was also an early supporter of the museum.

“Edna,” says Summers, “took a very active role in the museum and its growth. And for a long time she was its de facto curator.”

The exhibit is a must-see for all Skagit residents and those interested in the area’s history.

Fortunately, in this case, time isn’t an issue.

It remains on display until March of next year.