Territorial Voices: A Civil War Reader’s Theater

Lorraine McConaghy, award-winning author and historian for Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), will involve audiences in the lives of Civil War settlers in Washington Territory during Territorial Voices: A Civil War Reader’s Theater scheduled for 7 p.m., Saturday July 20 at the San Juan island Library. The program is free. Call the park at 360-378-2240, ext. 2233, or the library at 360-378-2798 for more information.

McConaghy’s talk is the second in the summer program series, Connections: The Far West and Civil War, which explores the relationships between the American Civil War, the San Juan Islands and Pacific Northwest. All programs are scheduled at the San Juan Island Library, except for the Life and Times of General George Pickett, which is next slated for August 7 at the San Juan Community Theatre.

The five remaining library programs—scheduled at 7 p.m., July 20, August 2, 3 (7:30 p.m.), 10 and 17—are free of charge, thanks to a $500 grant to the library from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

During McConaghy’s program, audience members will have the opportunity to read aloud a script excerpted from Civil War-era newspapers, diaries and correspondence in Washington Territory. The shared reading will be preceded by a brief lecture to set context and followed by a conversation about the ideas and themes raised by communal theater such as various opinions on race and slavery, secession and treason in the territory. Through this personal and dramatic experience, participants will realize the changing significance of words like “Democrat” and “Republican” and learn about settlers’ deeply-held convictions on the issues of the Civil War. Though far from battlefields, Washington Territory’s settlers brought the ideas of the war with them, when they traveled to the distant northwest. It is one thing to hear these startling realities in a lecture; it is more powerful to speak them.

As a public historian, McConaghy has devoted her professional life to researching and teaching Pacific Northwest history. She has curated a series of successful projects at MOHAI, including the museum’s core exhibits Metropolis 150 and Essential Seattle, as well as Blue vs. Gray: Civil War in the Pacific Northwest. She also teaches at the University of Washington, and her work has been honored by the Washington Museum Association, the Oral History Association, the National Council on Public History and the American Association for State and Local History.

McConaghy’s written work is scholarly and popular. Most recently, the University of Washington Press (UW Press) published Free Boy, her twined biography of master James Tilton and slave Charles Mitchell. Mitchell, a boy of 13, escaped from Olympia, Washington Territory on the international mail steamer Eliza Anderson in September 1860, to flee to the freedom of Victoria, following a tiny Underground Railroad of Puget Sound.

She is also the author of New Land North of the Columbia which is a history of Washington Territory and State (1853-present) shown through historical documents drawn from archives throughout the state. In 2009, the UW Press published her Warship Under Sail, an-depth study of the USS Decatur, a sloop of war in the Pacific Squadron, 1853-1859. The Decatur spent nearly a year in Washington Territorial waters, and Warship Under Sail sets the warship’s action here into a wider context of American Pacific imperialism.

In 2010, she received the Robert Gray Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Washington State Historical Society.

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