Hoquiam Olympic Stadium – All wood and proud of it!
Olympic Stadium is part and parcel of Hoquiam City’s past, present and future, many friendly and not so friendly competitions have been held within its heavy wooden walls and many hundreds of thousands of fans, participants and players have enjoyed its warm and welcoming embrace. The stadium has known in one sense or another the many faces of those who just passed through or made their homes there, from great grand fathers to grand fathers to fathers and their sons and those that come after them Olympic stadium has always stood in silent testament to the greatness of these men in whatever endeavor they have chosen to undertake.
The town truthfully got its interesting name from the river, which is its namesake that the Native Americans called in their own tongue “hungry for wood” river and this name aptly applied also to the first white settlers who in the 1850’s, established the first lumber camp on it’s shores, because the men never stopped coming over the years due to their insatiable hunger for wood. It is then but natural for the City fathers of the 1930’s to commission an all-wood design for their City’s stadium not so much so because they had an overflowing supply of it, but rather they wanted to make it as an underlying statement that logging has been good to the town and this is absolutely true for some of their so-called lumber elite.
The plans for the stadium was laid out in the most at the start of the 1930’s and the City went ahead with this and requested for a civil works administration grant for their dream stadium. A stadium that would attest to the nation and the world that despite all odds the people of this city will persevere, the grant was approved in 1932, but the building did not start until 6 years later and within the year groundbreaking started in early 1938 there was no stopping this monumental task, within a year of starting construction the Olympic Stadium was completed.
The stadium officially opened for use by the public on November 24, 1938 with the construction itself not taking more than a year from start to finish and this is their take on things much like how the lumber industry takes time to let trees grow for decades, to agree that everything is right or satisfactory and when the time has come it takes but a moment to finish what took decades or even more than a century to nurture and give life to, such are the circumstances there, the patience and understanding of a tree farmer that completes his task as a lumberjack with a razor sharp axe.
In 2005, again after much time has passed a local man, Congressman Norm Dicks prodded by his community constituents was able to secure through request a renovation grant that was awarded through the “Save America’s Treasures” program. The good Congressman also supported the State Historic Preservation Office request to recognize the stadium as a National Registry of Historical Places grantee, which the old stadium got in 2006.
The Olympic stadium was built to last more than a hundred years and it is just a few decades shy of that milestone. The residents who administered the construction knew their business and their business was wood and the all-wood stadium got the strongest and best of what the lumberjacks can take from nature. The lumber used was from ancient fir heavy-timber and the shingles that protected the outside walls were taken from cedar trees. The seats also made of wood are a testament to the quality of the lumber used for they are in remarkable shape.
The stadium had its last professional baseball game held within its confines in the latter part of 1990’s when the Grays Harbor Gulls of the independent Western League called Olympic Stadium their home. The historic stadium filled with so much of a people’s proud heritage is now home to the Grays Harbor Bearcats, a developmental football team.
The stadium can hold ten thousand fans within its stands and it host a lot of games in from both professional and local amateur teams, the town evidently loves sports and this shows with the number of teams it plays in as many events. Aside from the semi-pro Bearcats football team, there’s the city High School football team, Youth Baseball team, the Youth football and many more. It also serves the City of Hoquiam as its community center for bigger annual events.
Wade Entezar does the Hoquiam Olympic Stadium, A symbol of Hoquiam’s sense of camaraderie!
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