Home and Homelands Exhibition: Introduction

 Haynes family jelly kettle

Courtesy of Hanford History Project/Phil Mudd

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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This exhibition uses objects and places to tell stories of extraordinary women.

Each entry is from a different national park in the Pacific West, an area stretching from western Idaho to the Mariana Islands that has been fundamental in forging American identity. Each story is a portal connecting us to our past and showing us one of the many ways that women made homes in the diverse places of the Pacific West. Taken together, their stories reveal women’s agency as they sustained life, preserved cultural identities, broke boundaries, and resisted challenges. Home is where you stand.

Many-Layered Jelly Kettle

This unassuming jelly kettle comes from the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Washington State. It was used by the women of the Haynes family to make jelly in the early 1900s. On its surface, this kettle evokes a dominant story of the American West: a story that celebrates the self-reliance and determination of the white pioneer family with hard working women at the center – building family farm homes in the unforgiving West. The Haynes family did in fact harness the power of the Columbia River to irrigate the dry shrub-steppe into a fruit belt, which included garden berries that the Haynes women used to make their jellies. In the process, these foremothers helped develop Hanford into a bustling agricultural community.

But this is only one layer of the story. The jelly kettle, representing the Haynes family's attachment to Hanford as a home, also offers a glimpse into a history of displacement, first of the Native Americans that lived there before the Haynes arrived and later of the rural community that the Haynes women helped to create.

Hanford lay within the homelands of the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Wanapum, and Yakama Tribes. Each spring and summer they harvested the abundant berries in the surrounding mountains. Indigenous women of the Columbia Plateau wove the baskets that gathered, stored, and cooked these berries, as well as salmon from the Columbia River. They had a different relationship to the land than the Haynes women, an important reminder that there are multiple ways of knowing and making homes on western lands. In the face of displacement at the hands of settler communities like Hanford, Native women were and continue to be at the forefront of preserving knowledge about their homes and lifeways.

If we unpack another layer and ask what happened after women stopped using jelly kettles, we find yet another story, one about federal power. In 1943, the U.S. government commandeered the towns of Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland under the War Powers Act, displacing over a thousand residents and further dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands. They bulldozed settler homes to make room for plutonium production facilities for the Manhattan Project. The rural community that had been home to the Haynes family was replaced by a federal construction camp populated by over 40,000 workers that was segregated by race and gender.

Construction of the Hanford Engineer Works included the transformation of Richland into a government-built town complete with prefabricated “alphabet houses” with standardized floor plans and numerous amenities. Richland was reserved for professional permanent employees, nearly all of whom were white. As temporary workers, African Americans were prohibited from living there. This planned “egalitarian” community foreshadowed the racially restrictive mass suburban housing that became synonymous with the post World War II American Dream. In this new industrial setting, and in the face of race, gender, and class inequities, women continued to create homes in familiar ways. Now, mass-produced jelly in jars imported from elsewhere replaced the jelly kettle and the woven baskets of before.

These three layers – Indigenous, pioneer, and federal – are significant to the history of homemaking in the Pacific West. When we zoom in on any single layer of the jelly kettle’s story, we can see how women’s everyday work supported their homes and homelands. Their sacrifice and determination are paramount. If we zoom out and place these layers in succession, we can see how one group’s vision of home has often meant the destruction of another’s.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

The goal of the exhibition is to hold those truths together – connection and segregation, beauty and violence, the personal and political – in order to better see the whole of a most basic human endeavor: to make a home.

You will find these women’s stories organized by four major themes: loss, work, politics, and resistance. Within these themes, we find striking similarities in the stories across both time and place. None of them can escape the dispossession of Indigenous homelands or the power dynamics between groups of people as they claimed, made, and fought for their homes.

The women in this exhibition are like many of the women in your community. Most of them were doing what they needed to survive in challenging situations. They stood up for their families and communities, for justice, and for a better future for the next generation. Most of them had no idea how exceptional their efforts were. By gathering their stories together, we shine a light on the Pacific West and the remarkable women who have called it home.

Home and Homelands Virtual Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.