Annie Wright School - Shield Yearbook (Tacoma, WA)

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HISTORY

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BACK-THROUGH THE YEARS TO OUR READERS: May this intimate little history of the school we all love bring Happy nr emories to a ' inspiration to present day supporters who plan continue. greater achievement - • - Seminary. Tne Editors 1884 Five children — four girls and a boy in the middle — were just as excited as they could be over their father ' s decision to accept the call to become Bishop of Washing- ton Territory. They were born and had lived their little lives in the big Rectory of St. Peter ' s Church in the City of Brooklyn, New York. That was fifty years ago and this is a true story. The excitement reached its climax when the little boy of eleven was told that he could buy a pony out there for only fifteen dollars. He began to save up and the next year the pony came true and his name was Nellie! The biggest cities of Washington Territory in 1881 were Walla Walla with its four thousand people: Seattle with four thousand people: Spokane Falls, New Tacoma and Vancouver each with about fifteen hundred population. Walla Walla said: Make your home with us, Bishop, we have the best climate in the West, Seattle said: Come here, Bishop, we will soon be the New York of the Pacific Coast: Spokane Falls said: We are to be the center of a great Inland Empire: Tacoma said: Don ' t go to Vancouver. Bishop, they have malaria down there. Mr. Chas. B. Wright (resident of Philadelphia) and President of the Tacoma Land Company became the spokesman for the City of Destiny. He wrote: Dear Bishop, if you will undertake to raise twenty-five thousand dollars among your friends in the East, to build a School for Girls in Tacoma, I will give you fifty thousand dollars for an endowmer The opportunity to make possible Christian education for the rising generation of daughters of the pioneers: daughters who should lay a firm foundation for the great state that was to be: a state which would require women with kind, not callous hearts: with joyous, not pampered spirits: with broad, not petty minds: with refined, not tawdry tastes: with direct, not shifting speech. Women who could meet wealth with simplicity, and poverty with dignity and face life with quiet strength — developing from strength to strength: contributing to the righteous upbuilding of the great country which should reflect the Thought and Guidance of God. The challenge gripped the Bishop ' s mind and soul: the die cast, though stupendous the task. His great heart aflame to do and dare Blenched not at sacrificial way. but ran In holy haste to grapple with the plan. It was a far cry in that day from the Pacific to the Atlantic Coast. First came the steamer voyage to California to t e -- ; rr.c4- •tr n rop ' n ' pfal railway. Its train de P sae seven