Hidden Bricks: Carnegie Library/Clark County Historical Museum

Feeling unsettled after the funky energy of the Urban Barnhouse, Dave and I took a brief detour to a vintage store (this will end up becoming an amusing sidenote later) before heading to the Carnegie Library, now housing the Clark County Historical Museum.

After obtaining a couple of treasures from another time, we headed down the block to the Museum. Records inside reveal the library cost $10,000 to build.

Of course, of all the treasures housed in it's Hidden brick walls, the display I was most interested in was inside the Hidden Brick room itself.

One of the original wood molds

I geeked out SO HARD. The museum itself is on the site of an old Hidden clay pit. 

Here's a 360 Video View to the Hidden Brick Room inside. It can be rented out for events:

The treasures in the basement include a thick file on the Hidden family, which I flipped through in its entirety. It includes term papers written by students, a hand typed family history, and even funeral programs for family members. Historical museums are jewels of the community and wherever you live you should make friends with yours.

The Oracle has positive things to say here also:

Some of the peeks into the Hidden family history were really fascinating. I really enjoyed the old ads:

Robert Hidden wanted to be buried with a Hidden brick:

Robert Hidden died in 1992 at the age of 82. He was a devout Methodist. I hope he had a Hidden brick alongside him, as per his last request.

After the great Seattle fire of 1889, Hidden bricks were used to help reconstruct the city. Hidden bricks also were used to construct the Tacoma Hotel, which was a huge deal at the time: Tacoma Hotel

Unfortunately, the hotel burned in 1935 News Article:


Page 12 of the Hand Typed Hidden family history reveals that 40,000 hidden brick were loaded into a Schooner and used to build the Tillamook Lighthouse.

... Guess what? It's haunted. (There's another post coming about that...)

Hidden bricks went Astoria, Portland, even California. Hidden bricks went just about EVERYWHERE out here, turns out.

We spent about an hour and a half in the Museum researching the Hidden family. The energy feels welcome and inviting here, but one also definitely feels watched in the basement. In a building with so many important historical items, it is impossible to know if the activity reported here (people being touched in the bathroom, pipes banging) is related to the building itself or one of its housed artifacts.

Before we noticed the no voice recording sign (oops, we were alone in the basement library the entire time) I did a brief EVP session, as we didn't feel alone. There was nothing on the recorder, but an interesting note is it took several times to get the file to load into the software so that we could listen to it and kept crashing the laptop.

I plan on returning here to both dive deeper into Mother Joseph and the Providence Academy files and also the 400 unpublished Brautigan manuscripts here.

Treasures indeed, Hidden family. Thank you for the gift of this building. I'll be back soon.