Stories
A story of place;
a place of story...
Plas Newydd Farm is a storied place. From songs and stories of the Chinook and Cowlitz peoples, to homesteading records and 1850's maps, to the current stewardship by the Morgan family beginning in 1941, the stories of this place move across time.
Some of these stories are easier to know than others—the records kept since white settlement in the 1850's fill boxes and file drawers and are on the tip of the tongue of descendants of the families who have stewarded this land since settlement.
The stories of the land itself, and of the plants and animals and early peoples who called it home, are in the air here, but fill fewer boxes. But they are stories of this place, too.
The story of this farm, from the earliest people to the present, from logging to ranching to habitat restoration, is a story of human interaction with the landscape, and a story of stewardship. We have and will continue to have an impact on this landscape. We will clean up old messes and make new ones. We will continue to err in all kinds of human ways. But it is our hope that by engaging with artists willing to dig and create truthful art here, we will also open conversations that will bring healing and understanding to the land, and between each other.
This is our hope.Musings
The newly-certified Wapato Valley Mitigation and Conservation Bank will, over the next several years, convert several hundred acres of the farm from pasture to wetlands,
You’re likely wondering where you’ve landed, and what you might expect to find here. Your guess is as good as mine. In my recent experiments
When Julie, Ben, and I had harvested nine months earlier, we were careful to follow the practice of leaving the patch better than we found