The collections of printed and recorded media at the Eastside Heritage Center can be divided into three categories: Archives and Manuscripts, Photographs, and Oral History.
Archives and manuscripts
The Archives and Manuscripts Collection of the EHC contains both published and unpublished material.
Published material includes newspapers, school annuals, books, films and articles covering the history of the Eastside. The Eastside Heritage Center has a particularly extensive collection of issues of the Lake Washington Reflector, a local gazetteer which ran from 1918 through 1934 and On the Ways, a newsletter printed by the Lake Washington Shipyards during and after WWII. We have a near complete collection of Bellevue High School Annuals, as well as a substantial number of Sammamish High School yearbooks.
Unpublished material refers generally to the documents generated by people and businesses during their normal, day-to-day activities: diaries and journals, correspondence, scrapbooks, and business and administrative records. A few of the organizations that have donated records to the EHC are:
Springwood and Hunt's Point Garden Clubs
Bellevue Elementary School PTA
Nokomis Club (Friends of the Redmond Library)
T. R. U. S. T. (Tolls Represent Unfair State Taxation)
The Colman Diaries, written by Clarissa Colman and her daughter-in-law Margarete Mitchell Colman between the years 1886 and 1910, are among the most highly prized documents in our collections. These diaries have been photocopied and are available for research. However, due to their size (some 1100 pages), we suggest that researchers focus their attention on a particular topic, for example: Native Americans, a specific family, a year.
photographs
The Eastside Heritage Center's Photo Collection numbers in the thousands and contains images from the 1880s through the present day. Subjects are numerous: families, roads, homes, businesses, and vocational and recreational activities. The bulk of the imagescome from Redmond, Bellevue and Kirkland, but the collection also contains material from other local communities such as Sammamish, Issaquah, Monohan, and many other towns that no longer exist or have been annexed by larger communities.
For a good introduction to our photo collection, you can view 800 of these images on the web at King County Snapshots.
To purchase an image, contact the Collections Manager at 425-450-1049 or email collections@eastsideheritagecenter.org.
oral history
The Oral History Collection contains almost 200 sound and video recordings of interviews with citizens who lived and worked on the Eastside. Many of these interviews were collected as part of research projects dedicated to preserving the history of a particular topic, region, or business. Examples include the Eastside Women Project, the Lake Hills Project, and the Lake Washington Shipyards Project. Many interviews are available in transcribed (printed) form.
