Girl Scout cookie bags and handmade quilts. History Museum’s COVID collection has it all
It didn’t take long for Margaret Wetherbee to realize she had a problem — or, rather, a sizable gap.
Wetherbee is the head of collections at the Washington State Historical Society, which manages the permanent collection at the Washington State History Museum. In the burgeoning days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the months that have followed, she says that researchers have regularly come looking for materials related to the 1918 influenza pandemic.
The problem? The Historical Society doesn’t have much to offer.
“I mean, we still get requests all the time for, ’What information do you have about the 1918 flu?’ And we have a few images and a few artifacts, but people back then weren’t cognizantly … thinking they needed to collect and save for the future,” Wetherbee explained to The News Tribune this week.
This time around, it’s an omission the state Historical Society is trying to avoid. Back in March 2020, Wetherbee launched a campaign to begin accepting donations from Washingtonians experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic firsthand. The request was broad — soliciting everything from diaries to photographs, audio and video clips and physical objects from all across the state. The idea was to gather as much as possible for the benefit of future generations.
A year and a half later, the effort is coming to fruition, Wetherbee said. She’s already thrilled with the results, even if she admits that she initially viewed the project as a short-term endeavor, and it’s unfortunately become a long one — with no end in sight.
“We feel like it’s our job to make sure we’re collecting for the future in 100 years,” Wetherbee said of the proactive role the museum is trying to play in preserving history. “You never know what the takeaways are going to be. So making sure that we’re collecting a wide variety of materials is really important to us.”
How wide of a variety is Wetherbee talking about? Very wide, as it turns out. Examples of items the museum has collected (or been promised) so far include everything from one of the food kits that the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department initially sent out when someone contracted COVID-19 — which Wetherbee said remind her “of the materials that we have from the fallout shelters” — to lanyards for mask-wearing students that were never actually used in public schools and an original version of the “You’ll Heal Tacoma” signs that blossomed around town in the pandemic’s early days.
Wetherbee even hung onto the bag and the personalized note that accompanied her no-contact Girl Scout cookie delivery last year, she said.
“Not the cookies,” she quickly clarified. “The cookies are not going in.”
So far, one item Wetherbee is particularly excited about is a quilt that was recently donated by 69-year-old Denise Long of Stanwood. Long was the first person to reach out to the state history museum about potentially contributing to the collection, and the quilt she made — with help from others around the state — was officially delivered to Tacoma on Aug. 5.
Long said she was initially inspired by the well-known AIDS Memorial Quilt that was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1987, she said. Ultimately, her much smaller version grew to include 24 squares made by 20 different contributors. Each depicts a facet of life during the pandemic, from masks and delivered food to social distancing and the toilet paper shortage.
Prior to the pandemic, Long — who took up quilting roughly a decade ago — frequently volunteered with the Stanwood-Camano Island chapter of Days for Girls, which makes handmade feminine products for women around the world. Once COVID hit, the group — like many — transitioned to making cloth masks. Long used scraps from those masks on the quilt, which felt “symbolic,” she said.
Much like Wetherbee, Long said that everyone who contributed to the quilt “felt that it was important for future citizens of Washington to come in and see what life was like during the pandemic.”
It also helped the quilters cope, Long believes.
“I feel like it helped people see that they were part of something bigger,” Long said. “When we first started doing it, we were all isolated, and it actually created a bit of community.”
According to Wetherbee, the Historical Society plans to keep collecting items for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, however long it lasts, and however much storage it eventually ends up requiring. While the History Museum is currently displaying another fruit of her labor — a selection of COVID-related oral histories collected by University of Washington public health students — most of it will stay locked up and protected in the permanent collection, at least until future researchers come calling or the public is in a place to reflect.
“Sometime in the future, when we’re far enough away from the experience and everyone is ready to sort of look back, we will definitely have an exhibition of these materials that we are gathering now,” Wetherbee said.
“The more we collect now, the more stories that we have, and the easier time we will have in 100 years if there’s something like this that happens again.”
This story was originally published August 29, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
