Recently I received a notification on Messenger from a woman I didn’t know. She said she had a copy of an 1899 Port Townsend High School graduation program and wanted to know if I would like her to mail it to me.  She found me by searching on Facebook to see if the high school still existed, and came upon the Port Townsend High School Alumni Association Facebook group that I started many years ago.

In my 35 years of working for the Port Townsend School District, 27 of those years were as secretary to the principal at Port Townsend High School. One of my most challenging duties was as graduation coordinator. It was definitely an all-school-year-long project, but after spring break, it was a straight uphill and stressful climb to graduation day.

Since I am a PTHS graduate, I had a special interest in graduation; I used to pore over the past graduation lists and programs from the green binder in the filing cabinet, learning what I could about the history of our school.

Based on accompanying notes it looked as though many of the older lists were compiled by the alumni association (which started in 1897). They were all typed on a typewriter. I tried to imagine what life was like back then and what their graduations might have been like. We had no records or programs of graduations from the early years; there were just the lists of names in the green binder that I so often referred to.

I always wondered about the page from 1899 that had no graduates listed. How could that be?

The Messenger notification provided information: The Port Townsend High School program was found in a container in a local landfill and given to the woman who reached out because of her love for old things. There were other items in the container, and it took the write awhile to sort it out. She sent me a photo of the program.

I have a healthy dose of skepticism, so I was cautious. Maybe this was some kind of a scam. The woman lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and the landfill itself was 3,390 miles away.

I immediately went to my digital alumni files and my hard copy of the graduation lists. Again I saw the puzzling reference to there being no graduates that year. The 1899 list simply read, “No Class.”

But I returned again to the list of graduates, and that time I looked farther back, before 1899. BINGO! The two graduates listed on that 1899 program, were listed on the bottom of the 1898 graduation page, under a heading of, “No permanent record in existence.”

I made a trip to the Jefferson County Genealogical Society Research Center to see if there was a newspaper article available. The old Leader newspapers are on microfilm there and I was able to locate an article in The Morning Leader of June 23, 1899. I was delighted to read that they had a full house at graduation that year!

“All of Port Townsend turned out last evening to witness the exercises attendant upon the graduation of the class of ’99 from high school. All the seats within the desirable distance of the platform were taken early in the evening, and the crowd poured in until all the available space, even including the balcony of the rear of the hall, was packed.”

The graduation of two students took place at the Odd Fellows Hall in uptown Port Townsend on June 22, 1899. The alumni association also tracks the class mottos, class colors, class flower and number of graduates, and now that information will also be complete for 1899. Their motto was, “Out of School Life, into Life’s School.” Their class colors were blue and maize.  The Odd Fellows Hall has been the home of The Uptown Theatre since 1947.

So it is that 125 years after the graduation of Sophie Dorothy Peterson and Harold Frederick Forsythe that they will have their own page in the school’s and alumni’s historical file of graduates.

Happy graduation to Sophie and Harold, as the PTHS Class of 1899 has finally been validated for its proper place in our school’s history!