This post is part of the series 13 Ways of Looking at the Northwest. You can find the initial post here.
By Heather Lowcock, Project Archivist, NHPRC Grant – News Tribune Collection
Home is often rooted in a sense of belonging to land and to people. However, there has always been a kind of migratory nature to my understanding of home. I wasn’t out of my crib before I had flown my birthplace and started the journey that would take me around the country and across the world to (so far) over 20 new homes. I don’t have a fixed sense of home, but who I am has been informed by so many places and so many people. I belong not to one land or one community but to many. For others, home can be a place of safety or a place of fear, a place known or a place longed for, a place we are born into or a place we create for ourselves. It is something that can be taken away or something never found. Our experience of home, or its lack, can shape our way of looking.
Home Colony
Founded in 1896 by three families, the Home Colony on Joe’s Bay was established under principles of freedom. It was often labeled an anarchist colony. However, in a 1912 Tacoma Daily Ledger article, founding member George H. Allen wrote, “We had no idea that anyone would call us anarchists when we tried to be tolerant of each other.” Residents of the Home Colony could purchase a two-acre plot, guaranteeing permanent occupancy and use of land through the Mutual Home Association.
Among the residents was Jay Fox, labor activist and newspaperman who published his paper The Agitator at Home. And agitate it did. When the membership changed how land was owned in 1909, allowing property to be sold, new residents didn’t always align with the founding principles. In 1911, some called the sheriff to report public nude bathing, and Fox printed an editorial “The Nude and the Prudes,” celebrating personal liberty. More nude bathing ensued as well as more arrests, including that of Jay Fox for “encouraging disrespect and law-breaking.”
Virna Haffer, the innovative Tacoma photographer, grew up in the Home Colony. She arrived with her parents and sister in 1907. Home gave her the “freedom to make oneself” through education, play, and the arts. One such freedom came from an encounter with a visiting photographer when she was ten. Haffer’s photographs, often described as pictorialist and surrealist, experimented with photographic techniques, documenting modern landscapes, social causes, and portraiture. Haffer’s son and daughter-in-law Gene and Lillian Randall, when asked about the basis of her “free-spirited nature,” responded simply, “Home! —she was raised at Home!”
In a 1966 News Tribune article marking the 70th anniversary of Home, Leila Edmunds, resident and daughter of founding member George H. Allen recalled, “Home was never a bad place. We had some philosophical anarchists, but they were peaceful. [...] A few people believed in nude bathing, as modern nudists do, but they were only doing what they thought was right.”
Housing Discrimination
It is perhaps more palatable for society to classify discrimination as an individual act--the shopkeeper denying service or the employer denying a job because they’re easier to redirect blame. These individual acts are certainly harmful and must be held to account. However, it is also necessary to recognize the systems that existed, and often continue to exist, by which discrimination becomes a norm that has generational impact. Some of the photographs of neighborhoods in the News Tribune collection suggest that housing is one such system.
Racially restrictive covenants were clauses added to property agreements banning the sale or rental of the property to designated groups. The first covenants in Tacoma were written in the early 1900s but were actively encouraged in the 1920s when the Tacoma Real Estate Board aligned with the National Association of Realtors’ Code of Ethics, which stated their responsibility to “never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood…members of any race or nationality…whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” Such covenants were further bolstered in 1926 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they were enforceable contracts. This legally restricted owners and future owners from selling or leasing property to specified groups without facing repercussions. Well into the 1950s, new-build subdivisions, many in areas around Lakewood and University Place, carried racial restrictions citing “no other race than Caucasian” or “no person of African or Asiatic descent.” Tacoma did not pass an open housing ordinance that banned housing discrimination based on “race, creed, or color” until after Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
Redlining is the discriminatory practice of refusing financial services including loans, mortgages, and insurance to those living within specific geographical areas. In the mid-1930s the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Agency were charged with encouraging banks to resume issuing mortgages to stabilize the housing market after the Great Depression. However, to minimize presumed risk, HOLC hired realtors to assist in the creation of maps that designated areas of investment value. Areas were ranked by color: green (“best”), blue (“still desirable”), yellow (“definitely declining”), and red (“hazardous”). In this 1937 map of Tacoma, green areas were often described as “homogenous populations” with notations of “no threat” regarding the “infiltration” of “foreign-born, Native American, Negro, or relief families.” Areas in red and yellow remark upon the presence of black, indigenous, and immigrant communities with many low income “relief families” as “detrimental influences.” Such “residential security maps” explicitly applied race and class to their assessment of value.
These systemic acts of discrimination compounded by the individual acts of realtors and property owners ultimately limited homeownership and denied economic growth to many in cities across the country including Tacoma. Two Hilltop neighborhood surveys taken in 1966 and 1992 illustrate the generational impact of these policies. While many areas in the U.S. had increased homeownership during the 1950s and 60s, the Hilltop neighborhood had an increased number of renter-occupied units. The explanation: “Generally, non-whites have found mortgage money difficult to obtain.” By the 1992 survey, homeownership continued to decrease with many houses left vacant and derelict.
Longhouses and Allotments
In conversation with Cecelia LaPointe-Gorman at Northwest Indian College in 2009, Puyallup tribal activist Ramona Bennett described the transition from a “longhouse tradition [of] mutually protected societies” to the reservation and allotment system: “Everyone had a role, everyone was needed, and everyone was valued. Our societies were solid…we were matrilineal…life was good. […] Then our families had to be divided up and live on these parcels of land…in isolated little cabins, totally on their own, living within a racist society.”
Lummi Elder Pauline R. Hillaire recounted a similar loss and its effects after the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855: “Our ancestors were photographed in front of their temporary shelters instead of showing them at home at the great longhouses that were our original, permanent homes…a pictorial misrepresentation of our culture in the records of history.” Many of those longhouses had been burned.
Treaties like that of Point Elliott in 1855 and Medicine Creek in 1854 (renegotiated in 1856) demarcated land and fishing rights reserved for Indigenous communities. However, those initial boundaries and rights wouldn’t last long as federal legislation like the Homestead Act in 1862 and the Dawes Act in 1887 permitted non-indigenous citizens to claim land, placed “surplus” land under federal control, and sought to “eliminate Indian landholdings” and “assimilate Indians according to white ideals.”
In 1873, President Grant ordered a survey of the Puyallup lands designated within the Medicine Creek Treaty, a total of 18,062 acres. The government created 167 allotments just under 7,500 acres with additional acreage for farmland. In 1889, the federal government permitted land not allotted to be available to settler-invaders with additional “surplus” given to industries. As urban development increased, the Puyallup struggled to live, hunt, and fish as promised. The Puyallup Act of 1893 imposed greater restrictions by limiting how allotments could be sold and adding exorbitant fees to the sale. This increased not only loss of land but also economic instability for the Puyallup People.
In the many years since the creation of the allotments, the Puyallup Tribe has protested and fought to regain many of the rights defined in the Medicine Creek Treaty and the return to a home that has always been theirs. In January 2025, they broke ground on a new longhouse.
The digitization and processing of the News Tribune Photograph Collection was supported by a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives.
Sources:
Allen, George H. (1912, January 7). Inside workings of anarchistic colony are revealed. Tacoma Daily Ledger.
Bennett, Ramona. (2009, May). Interview by Cecilia La Ponte-Gorman [transcript]. University of Washington-Tacoma Oral History and Memory Project. [CAC4003] Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room, Tacoma, WA, United States.
City of Tacoma. (1966). Hilltop neighborhood survey. City of Tacoma.
Dowling, Sophia. (2022). Tacoma’s history of racial exclusion, segregation, and housing. Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium, University of Washington. https://depts.washington.edu/covenants/segregation_tacoma.shtml
Haffer, V., Bullock, M. E., Henderson, C. S., & David Francis Martin. (2011). Virna Haffer: A turbulent lens. Tacoma Art Museum.
Hall, G. (2022). Writing labor’s emancipation. University of Washington Press.
Hillaire, P., & Fields, G. P. (2016). Rights remembered: a Salish grandmother speaks on American Indian history and the future. University Of Nebraska Press.
Long, Anthony. (2024, June 12). Redlining, racial covenants, and housing discrimination in Tacoma. HistoryLink. https://www.historylink.org/File/22992
Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. University of Richmond. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/WA/Tacoma/areas#loc=12/47.2361/-122.4748
Pacific Development Concepts. (1992). Hilltop neighborhood population and housing profile. Planning and Development Services Department.
Palmer, Hailey. (2025, January 13). Tribe breaks ground on longhouse. https://www.puyalluptribe-nsn.gov/news/tribe-breaks-ground-on-longhouse/
Ryan, Jack. (1966, February 10). Once called land of ‘anarchy, sin,’ Home notes birthday quietly. The News Tribune.
Schaeffer, K. K. (2010). A bitter pill: Indian reform policy, Indian acculturation, and the Puyallup Act of 1893. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 102(1), 14–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23059492
