East Washingtonian - Your Hometown News Source

By Lillian Heytvelt

The Denny Ashby Library recently completed an addition of new items to the Washington Rural Heritage: Garfield County: Baldwin Family digital collection. The Baldwin Family collection now contains 220 items preserving the history of one of the county’s early pioneer families and life in the Ping and Columbia Center areas of Garfield County. The entire Baldwin Family digital collection can be viewed online at: https://www.washingtonruralheritage.org/digital/

Items of note in the new additions include photos from a 1913 PHS football game vs. Waitsburg, the 1941 Motor Vehicle Licenses Handbook for Garfield County, and numerous letters and postcards between the Ralph and Alta Baldwin family and friends in Whitman County. Watch the Denny Ashby Library’s Facebook page for an online scavenger hunt through the new material to be posted soon with prizes sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

The Denny Ashby Library partnered on this project with Jennifer (Baldwin) Ashby, the director of the Asotin County Library, who upon the passing of her father, Merle Baldwin, inherited her grandmother Alta Morris Baldwin’s trunk full of family memorabilia. The digitization work and cataloging were done by Cody Jones and the project was funded by a Washington Digital Heritage grant from the Washington State Library.

Washington Rural Heritage provides access to digitized primary sources documenting the early culture, industry, and community life of Washington State. The collection is an ongoing project of small, rural libraries and partnering cultural institutions, guided by an initiative of the Washington State Library (WSL), Office of the Secretary of State, and funded under the provisions of the Library and Services Technology Act (LSTA) from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Other collections in the Garfield County Rural Heritage to browse include: Civilian Conservation Corps in Garfield County, Early Towns, Eastern Washington Agricultural Museum, John Bertram Brady and Bertha Houser, and Tramways.