Brian Mittge Commentary: Unleash Your Inner Child; Honoring Our State’s George Bush

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Lewis County’s very own toy store, Let’s Play Something, has just reopened in a new downtown Centralia location inside a glorious historic building storefront. 

This great playground for all ages began online in 2010. It has slowly been migrating northward since originally opening in the former Napavine City Hall building in 2015. 

It moved to the Fairway Center between the Twin Cities in 2018, and now is at home in the heart of the Hub City. Check them out at 109 N. Tower Ave. or at www.LetsPlaySomething.com. 

If you’ve never visited Let’s Play Something, do yourself a favor and stop in. Whatever your age, whatever excuse you need to make for going into a toy store, just do it. 

Your inner child will leap for joy at all their toys, games and general fun-in-a-box.

While we’ve all gotten used to shopping online over the past year, there’s some shopping that’s just better in person. Buying toys tops the list. 

Congratulations to the good folks of Let’s Play Something for their new storefront, and congratulations to all of you who decide to visit in person. The 9-year-old who still lives inside you will be glad you did. 

 

Honoring Our State’s George Bush

When I was learning about Centralia’s founder, the African-American pioneer George Washington, I often heard another presidential name attached to a similar Northwest homesteader named George Bush. 

Bush, like Washington, lived under increasingly harsh racist laws in Missouri. Bush came west in 1844 and Washington came in 1850 to find freedom, but both discovered upon arrival that the Oregon Territory had its own problems for them — Black exclusion laws. 

Both men independently came to a similar conclusion — cross the Columbia River and find a remote area where they could hunker down out of the effective reach of the territorial government.

Bush and his wife, who was white, settled in the area that we now know as Tumwater, establishing a homestead in 1845 along the Deschutes River.  

He and his family found success as farmers, loggers and mill operators. As more settlers came into the territory, the Bushes were generous with those in need. 

In 1852 (just as George Washington was starting to build his claim shanty down along the Chehalis and Skookumchuck Rivers), George Bush found himself surrounded by new American immigrants who were in desperate need during a famine. 

Bush wouldn’t sell to speculators, but he gave food and seed to folks who were truly in need. Another famous settler, pioneer Ezra Meeker, wrote about this in a book on Washington’s early history. 



“Pay me in kind next year,” Meeker recounts Bush saying to those in need. To those who had money, he said, “Don’t take too much — just enough to do you.”

He gave away his whole crop to help his new neighbors become established. 

In a bitter irony, just a few years earlier Congress had deprived Bush of security on the land he had settled. The 1850 Donation Land Claim Act specifically excluded Black settlers like George Bush and George Washington. 

George Washington found a way around this law by having his white foster parents take out the homestead in their names. Bush didn't have that option, but he had other friends who rose to his defense.

George Bush’s grateful neighbors circulated a petition on his behalf, writing, “he has contributed much towards the settlement of this Territory, the suffering and needy never having applied to him in vain for succor and assistance...”

Eleven months later, on Feb. 6, 1855,        Congress passed a specific exemption for George Bush. A decade after he was one of the first Americans to settle south of Puget Sound, his 640 acres were legally his at last. 

Bush died eight years later, in 1863. His oldest son, William Owen Bush, became a member of the very first Washington state Legislature. 

Now the Legislature is honoring the Bush family with a new informational monument on the Capitol grounds, near the “winged victory” World War II monument. 

It will also be near a flourishing tree that is another long-lasting legacy of Bush’s pioneer days. 

That butternut tree on the Capitol grounds grew from the seed of an original tree that Bush planted in 1845. Bush’s tree still lives on his homestead, and it provides another enduring link between George Bush and George Washington. 

During our bicentennial celebration of Centralia’s founder, arborist Ray Gleason — who planted that Bush butternut tree at the state Capitol a decade ago — also planted one at Fort Borst Park in Centralia. Our Bush butternut tree is also growing well. You can see it near the pioneer church replica at the Borst homestead. 

It’s heartening to see Washington’s pioneer legacy celebrated and thriving in Tumwater, in Centralia, and in the self-reliant yet generous spirit that our forebears brought with them and planted deeply in the soil of the Pacific Northwest. 

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Brian Mittge explores our yesterdays and tomorrows each Saturday in The Chronicle. Contact him at brianmittge@hotmail.com.