Kittitas County's Guardian of History: Fred Krueger

   Over the years, Fred Krueger has been described as a “citizen archivist” and a “true godsend” for his efforts to preserve and share the stories of those who lived and worked in upper Kittitas County.

   As a social studies teacher in the Cle Elum-Roslyn School District for more than 29 years, Krueger, who retired in 1996, adopted a hands-on teaching method to bring alive his lessons. This approach to learning, in turn, helped him not only make his instruction more relevant but led to him being able to tap into community history that might otherwise have been lost.

   Author Paul Fridlund, who has written several Central Washington history books, said that shortly after Krueger arrived in Cle Elum to teach history, he realized it was a subject his students despised because of how it had previously been taught.

   “Mr. Krueger came up with a plan to engage the students and give them a sense of heritage, even if they moved to other parts of the world after graduation,” Fridlund wrote. “He offered the kids a deal, one not every student accepted. In exchange for abandoning the Washington History book the students hated, he offered a class in local history.”

   The result was the development of a curriculum, which Krueger created from scratch, that incorporated local history books, simulations, and original research by the students.

   The type of instruction, which modern education theorists would probably described as a form of “inquiry learning,” encouraged students to make real-world connections through their personal research and questioning. It was also a style of learning consistent with Krueger’s earlier training at the University of Washington (UW).

   Krueger was born in the small town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota in 1939. He attended local schools in the community and earned a BS in Science and Social Studies, with a history emphasis, from Mankato State College (now called Minnesota State University-Mankato) in 1962.

   Following his graduation, Krueger taught secondary school in Molville, Iowa and Keokuk, Iowa for three years. In 1965, he decided to further his education and was accepted into the Russian Regional Studies Program at UW.

   “I was in the Russian Institute, and there were 25 of us selected in there, and I was the only one that didn’t have a scholarship,” Krueger noted in a 2015 oral history interview recorded for Central Washington University. “They got me a job part-time while I was going to graduate school and then I did so well with my work that Dr. Karl August Wittfogel, who was one of my teachers. He hired me as a teaching assistant because I knew more than the rest of the students did in class.”

   Dr. Wittfogel also played an important role in mentoring Krueger in proper scholarship and research techniques required for the serious study of history, including preserving historical records and capturing institutional memories.

   Krueger, who is 85, remains as sharp as a man many decades younger. During a recent interview in his Ellensburg home, he recalled that he took the Cle Elum job precisely because the community had such a strong Eastern European identity. He said his interest and background in Russian studies, plus the fact he spoke Russian, served him well in relating to the Eastern European immigrants who had settled in Cle Elum and Roslyn during their mining heydays.

   “There were a lot of Eastern European immigrants there. The immigrants are interesting people. Those from Eastern Europe had little education [but deeply respected getting an education]. When school levies were put up for a vote, they all voted yes,” he recalled.

   “So, I was a teacher and I was highly respected. More so than what you would find if I was in a community that wasn’t of such an immigrant ancestry,” he continued.

   Krueger said once he had settled into his teaching job, he began incorporating the hands-on teaching methods he learned about in his studies.

   “I wanted to teach the kids research skills and so we started with Washington History and it progressed to the point where the state said we could give a local history credit instead of the Washington State History credit. So, the state endorsed what I was doing,” he said.

   Additionally, a UW education professor, Dr. John Jarolimek, who Krueger had met during his time at the university, invited him to participate in the Tri-University Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

   For the project, Krueger researched a variety of teaching styles, methods, and behaviors, paying attention to such things as body language and feedback. He also was instructed in the use of simulation theory in the classroom.

   The latter would prove invaluable in his teaching, especially when it came to acquiring and preserving local primary historical resources, like oral histories. In 1969, he received a grant from the state Superintendent of Public Instruction for equipment and supplies, such as tape recorders and cameras, to help his students hone their primary research skills.

   Soon, his students were interviewing family members, asking targeted questions about family history, such as immigrating to the U.S., and how they came to settle in the Upper Kittitas County. Many of these projects were later donated to the Central Washington University (CWU) Special Collections.

   “Krueger created class projects utilizing primary resources obtained through individual students and their research,” noted Stephen J. Hussman, former Chair of Library Services and University Archivist at CWU.

   “Often these projects resulted in locally significant class and school presentations including oral histories, photos, manuscripts, letters, family recipes, recollections of travel to the new country (immigrant experience), and more,” Hussman noted in an article that appeared in the Journal of Western Archives in 2014. “He was credited as one of the first teachers in the locale to utilize simulation and primary resource material in class instruction.” 

   The self-effacing Krueger remains proud of the fact he was among the first high school history teachers to use simulations to teach the importance of economic factors in history, something standard in most history books today. For example, one of the simulations might have a student designated as a farmer and there would be “fate” cards regarding such concerns as bad weather, a bad year for crops, and other challenges.

   “Those simulations that I was using were so powerful that to this day [my former students] still remember them,” he said, adding that he conducted post-simulation game discussions because the students would become so emotionally invested in the results.

   When talking about his teaching days, Krueger is quick to credit his former students for any success he might have had. He said the most meaningful achievement during his long career was “seeing the kids’ work. The quality was amazing. I had one piece of work that was museum quality for display and unfortunately they put it in the doggone NWI [Northwest Improvement Company] store window which faces south and has direct sunlight and it just ‘pssst’ [faded away].”

   Over the years, Krueger’s students were able to become involved in several important historic preservation projects. Among them was their work to clean up and preserve Roslyn’s historic cemeteries.

   “That grew out of it [the classes] because they had to do some community service,” he said. “I was the first one to start something like this.

   “The Roslyn Kiwanis Club had started restoration of the Roslyn Cemeteries and they needed help. The contacted me to see if the students would be interested in helping to clean it up,” Krueger said. “I asked the kids if they wanted to help, and they agreed. We were able to create a partnership that lasted for more than 20 years.”

   Another successful project with which he was involved was the saving of the Salmon la Sac Guard Station in the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest. The station, which the forest service wanted to remove, had been built in 1912 by the Kittitas Railway and Power Company, as a depot, which sought to construct an electric rail line between upper county communities.

   “I had one student who picked the railroad depot at Salmon la Sac [for his community service project],” Krueger explained. “When I saw that report, I had to go and check everything out to make sure what I was looking at was accurate. Needless to say, it was accurate.”

   Krueger said the research started a preservation movement on behalf of the depot in Roslyn and Cle Elum and within a few weeks more than 3,000 local residents had signed a petition to preserve it, which soon gained support from Washington’s U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. By 1974, the forest service had dropped its plans to demolish the station, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places and the Washington Heritage Register.

   Interestingly, while Krueger has had a lifelong interest in history, he was more motivated by the desire to teach his students how to perform quality research.

   “I was more interested in the process, and local history was a means to an end,” he said. “The way we started out was with the 9th graders, I told the kids you’re going to have to do some work where there is no book, there are no sources, and I said you’re going to have to use your family.

   “Roslyn had lost its school, had lost its grocery store, it lost the Number 9 mine, which was the last mine to close, so what did Roslyn have left that people could take pride in and grow with?”

   Answering that question also led him to a long friendship with a former Roslyn coal miner named Frank Musso, who was the founder of the Roslyn Museum and its first director. Krueger said he and Musso, who died in 1986 at the age of 95, “used to sit down and we would talk about these things. And Frank could see the best resource for Roslyn was its history, its culture, its heritage.”

   Because of that connection Krueger has remained a devoted supporter of the Roslyn Museum, helping it to inventory its historic photo and document collections. During my visit, he even pointed to several boxes of photos that he had recently catalogued for the museum.

   Scott Templin, chair of the Roslyn Museum, credits Krueger for “the upper valley holding on to one of the largest local heritage collections in the country.

   “While most community’s heritage got sold off or lost bit-by-bit, he managed to get his students to save theirs,” Templin continued. “Everyone should have a chance to know and be proud of their family history, and local heritage. We don’t see that much these days.”

   Over the years, in fact, Krueger accumulated a large collection of personal papers, diaries, videos, memorabilia, and local history artifacts, which he donated a few years ago to CWU Special Collections. Krueger estimated he has to date bequeathed nearly 80 cubic feet of files, photos, photo negatives, slides, and other material to Central.

   Templin said Krueger has had a major impact on not only the upper county but on his former students, noting, “I would be willing to bet that if you asked the generation of kids that were lucky enough to have him as a teacher, 95 percent or more would rank him as their Number One.”

   As someone committed to learning throughout his life, it was no surprise when, from 1988 to 1990, he was selected for a Fulbright- Hayes Grant to study in China. Three years later, he was picked by then-Governor Michael Lowry and the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Judith Billings, to teach in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, from 1994 to 1995.

   That desire to keep busy and to have something new to learn has led him to his latest research project—tracing where residents of Roslyn’s once-thriving black community moved on to after leaving the town. His hope is to collect as much information about those families as he can and give that research to the Roslyn Museum.

   “He [Krueger] is still doing amazing work for the community, through research for the Roslyn Museum. That impact will take years to fully appreciate,” Templin said. “To see him still get as giddy as a school boy when he discovers a previously unknown piece of the history puzzle is priceless.”

   Krueger also still pays pretty close attention to what’s happening in Roslyn and Cle Elum. He’s pleased to see that the economies of the two communities—depressed when he arrived in 1967 because of the closing of the mines—have rebounded, but is concerned about their futures.

   “Roslyn has a heritage but it also has a geography that people like, kind of like Leavenworth,” he said, reflecting on some of the new developments that have cropped up in recent years. “Now, Roslyn is getting loved to death.”

 

Ellensburg's Blue Beauties

   In the gem world, a pale, blue stone known as the Ellensburg Blue Agate, or simply the Ellensburg Blue, is considered rock royalty.

   Formed through a complex series of geological and volcanic processes that occurred over—literally—millions of years, the agate has been described as one of the rarest gemstones in the world and is only found in northwest Kittitas County, largely in the area known as the Green Canyon notch (up Green Canyon and Reecer Creek roads).

   While in the past some blues had been discovered by farmers and ranchers in the alluvial fan below the notch, today nearly all that are uncovered are found on private property at higher elevations (pay attention to the ‘No Trespassing’ signs!).

   According to geologists, the agates came about as a result of the gradual depositing of small amounts of minerals mixed with silica-laden groundwater into small cavities or bubbles that formed in cooling volcanic basalt flows.

   The agate’s blue coloring, which can range from a light sky blue to much darker azure shades, sometimes with a slight purple tinge, is thought to be the result of trace elements that are present during formation, including copper, iron and manganese.

   One aspect of the agate that defines it is its relative hardness. An Ellensburg Blue will test from 7.5 to 8.3 or harder on the Mohs scale (named for the scale’s creator, chemist Fredrich Mohs), which is used to measure the hardness of a stone. For comparison, a diamond is a 10 on the Mohs scale, while talc is a 1.

   The earliest records of the existence of the Ellensburg blue can be traced to the native Kittitas people, the first residents of the Kittitas Valley area. Geologist John Prentiss Thomson, who grew up in Ellensburg and wrote a booklet called “Ellensburg Blue” in 1961, said the native people apparently didn’t use the blue gems for arrowheads or tools but instead found them useful when trading with white settlers.

   Interestingly, one of those most responsible for establishing the Ellensburg Blue as a desirable stone was Austin Mires, a local attorney and the town’s first mayor. In 1905, extracted some of the bright blue gems and had them set into rings.

   “Had two blue agate ring sets mounted in Seattle,” he wrote in his diary on March 29, 1905. “Cost $10, 14 carat gold.”

   About a decade later, Mires hired a stone cutter from Germany, and set up a small shop to sell the blue agates in a storefront that was located where Safeway now stands. The business did not prosper and was soon closed.

   Mrs. Mires, however, learned from the rock cutter how to cut and polish the stones. She continued to do so as a hobby and, according to a later account, “turned out some beautiful examples of lapidary art.”

   The Mires, however, weren’t the only ones to see something of value in the blue stones. A large part of the reason that John Prentiss Thomson was so interested in Ellensburg Blues was because his father, J.N.O. Thomson owned and operated a jewelry store at 318 N. Pearl Street in Ellensburg from 1913 to 1941 (the building no longer exists).

   According to the younger Thomson, in May 1913, several members of the Kittitas tribe showed his father specimens of the local blue agate and told him where to find more.

   “I happened to be in the store one evening and heard our favorite . . .  [tribal member], Cecilia, give one bit of instruction that has remained in my memory to this day. She said, ‘Walk with the sun over your left shoulder.’ The language was not this explicit but she demonstrated by walking and pointing [to where the stones could be found].”

   The elder Thomson soon began to craft jewelry using the gems, but also promoting their brilliance and beauty. In an Ellensburg Daily Record News ad on May 14, 1917, beneath the headline, “Ellensburg Blue Agate,” Thomson senior said, “Ellensburg has one gem that can be found nowhere else—the BLUE AGATE. The appearance of the stone as it is found in the rough does not even suggest its beauty when cut and polished. The colors range from light to dark blue, with occasionally one in rich lavender.”

   Two years later, Thomson the jeweler noted in an ad: “We have left two very choice Lavalliers, in the rare-blue agates, which to our knowledge are not found outside of the Kittitas Valley. We refer to the very deep blue agates which are more beautiful than opals, and far more durable.”

   John Prentiss Thomson credited increased attention on the blue gems around that time to a story that appeared in a local newspaper, which was headlined, “Local Jeweler Finds Blue Agate Mine.”

   “The article aroused considerable interest in blue agate jewelry and this continued until the automobile became common,” he wrote in his book. “After that, young men were much more likely to spend their money for gasoline and tires than on jewelry for their lady friends.”

   Thomson noted that until the day his father closed his jewelry shop, he always had blue agate jewelry on display. He added that whenever a tourist wandered into the store, and asked if there was anything that would make a good souvenir of the area, his father inevitably responded, “We have jewelry made from an agate near here and found nowhere else in the United States, the blue agate, a true souvenir of this valley.”

   Interest in the blue agates continued unabated throughout the next several decades. In July 1957, members of the Ellensburg and Cle Elum Boy Scouts attending a National Jamboree in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, presented an Ellensburg Blue to then-President Dwight Eisenhower.

   In response, the president conveyed his thanks for gift to Congressman Hal Holmes of Ellensburg, asking Holmes in a letter to “transmit to the boys my appreciation of their kindness.”

   On August 26, 1975, the city of Ellensburg celebrated Ellensburg Blue Day, which attracted more than 300 people to the Kittitas County Historical Museum to admire the museum’s displays of the blue agates and jewelry.

   Of course, part of what makes Ellensburg Blues so treasured is the fact that they are rare. By the late 1970s and 1980s, most of the easily obtainable gems had been excavated. An April 19, 1976 feature in the Daily Record News noted, “Ellensburg blues are getting scarce, but rock hounds who ply the fields and natural breaks in land north and west of Ellensburg are increasing, and the demand for the native agate is becoming greater.”

   The story also lamented the number of rock hunters who ignored the private property signs and were trampling private rangelands in their quest for the blues.

   Since there are many different types of blue agates in the world, determining if one is an Ellensburg Blue can be challenging. With the cost of a true blue selling for between $100 and $250 per karat, it’s important to know if it’s the real deal.

   While some suggest holding the blue agate up to the sun and looking for a pink tint, which indicates it’s a genuine blue, the best way is to consult an expert. A handful of local jewelry stores—which also sell their own Ellensburg Blue pieces—can verify a stone, including Kim Khap Gems and Jewelry in Ellensburg and Ireland Jewelers in Cle Elum.

   Perhaps the best place to view the elusive blues is at the Kittitas County Historical Museum at 114 E. 3rd Avenue in Ellensburg, which boasts one of the largest collections of Ellensburg Blues. More than 50 samples of the agates are in the museum’s ongoing Rock and Mineral display.

   If you’re interested in searching for your own blue—and want to avoid breaking no trespassing laws—you can purchase a permit at the 180-acre Rock ‘n’ Tomahawk Ranch, a private operation that allows rock hunting. Located at 2590 Upper Green Canyon Road in Ellensburg, the ranch is open seasonally (in warmer months). For reservations, which are required, call 509-962-2403.