"Is it Going to Look Like a Fort?"

While the staff at Fort Walla Walla Museum finsishes its planning for our biggest event of the year, Fort Walla Walla Days! set for June 13-14, construction continues on our new Entrance building. Much of the effort is being directed at the entry of the new structure, with the installation of the blockhouse entry visitors will see from the new parking lot just outside.

With our A Special Season series of exhibits in the Headquarters this year, we've talked with a lot of people who wonder if the new building will "look like a fort." When here, they can get a good look at our plans, blueprints, and architects models that show what we hope to end up with after Phase I is completed, as well as the vision for the entire project, completed perhaps over a decade. The answer to the question is, well, yes and no. I think what folks are expecting is that our new appearance will resemble that classic "Fort Apache" look from the movies that people associate with military forts from the Old West. Ours won't look like that.

While some of the early Northwest Fur Company and Hudson's Bay Company trading posts had stockades and blockhouses, military forts did not resemble those. At one time in the early 1820s, the post's Chief Factor described the place as "the Gibraltar of the Columbia." You can get a glimpse of the military's idea of a fort at the Jonathan M. Wainwright Memorial Veterans Medical Center ... the VA ... just around the corner from us, or a stroll down the 'Planet Walk.' On the backside of the VA facility stand the 1858 Officers Quarters, though their appearance today is not what they originally looked like. Nevertheless, that clapboard look is what we're striving for. Inititally, we thought to have them painted deep brown, as is the Headquarters building, but research indicated that such a color was not in keeping with reality. A greyish-white/whitish-grey is more like it.

We expect to complete construction by October, which means the tough work of filling up new space must begin ... that leaves us only five months to get ready for a new season in 2010! If you'd like to make a contribution to the cause, we're all ears.

Today's photos should help you get a look at what we're up to with the entry and some comparisons to the past. At the top: a construction photo shows the beginnings of the new entry; next is an image of the VA's Officers Quarters as they appear today; the black-and-white image is the Hudson's Bay Company fort at Wallula on the Columbia River, ca. 1820; the original adobe block construction beneath the exterior of the Officer's Quarters; an architect's rendering of Phase I shows the grey-white color of the buildings; and the other architect's rendering shows the design of the blockhouse-look entrance.