EXECUTIVE COUNCIL FOR THE JOB CARR CABIN MUSEUM
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Mission Statement
JCCM uses Job Carr's story to open the door to Tacoma's history for students and our community.
About This Cause
Founded in 2000, the Job Carr Cabin Museum brings local Tacoma history to life through youth education, experiential learning for families, and community building rooted in storytelling and a shared sense of place. The museum itself is housed in a replica of the first non-Native, permanent residence in Tacoma, a small log cabin built, like Job's original cabin, on land that traditionally belonged to the Puyallup People. We are open to the public two days a week during the school year and four days a week during the summer season. Our team is small - with three part time employees - but we have a wonderful group of volunteer docents that help maintain these hours and assist at community festivals and events. Using Job Carr's story, we introduce conversations about migration, settlement, courage, resilience, love, and the concept of home. Our hope is that families leave the cabin and our events knowing that the history of their community is something they can see, touch, experience – and perhaps most importantly, impact. By making local history accessible and engaging, our work encourages children to connect more deeply with their own cultural heritage and family stories, with the place they call home, and with each other, fostering civic engagement and a commitment to our community’s future. SCHOOLS OUTREACH PROGRAM: At the heart of our work is our youth programming, which has connected thousands of students to the history of the South Sound through field trips, Traveling Trunks with expertly crafted curriculum grounded in local history, and Traveling Storytimes for our youngest learners. Over the course of the 2024/2025 school year, these education programs have reached over 6,400 elementary- and preschool-aged children. In addition, our craft offerings, summer storytimes, and homeschool field trips encourage families to enjoy Old Town Park together, supporting connections between parents and their children, and each other. Our Schools Outreach Program focuses on the following programs: 1. Field Trips: We welcome as many as 90 students to the cabin at a time, totaling approximately 2,000 over a school year. Students rotate between 3 stations: 1) life in the cabin, during which groups explore the interior of the cabin and ask questions about frontier living; 2) Oregon Trail history with a living history performer, during which students interact with artifacts and imagine life as children on the Oregon Trail; 3) a walking tour of Old Town, which explores some of Tacoma's most historic places. Every field trip begins with a land acknowledgement that asks students to honor the Puyallup Tribe's past and present stewardship by caring for the land and each other. This year, we served 2,775 students through in-person and virtual field trips. 2. Traveling Trunks: This year, our Traveling Trunks reached over 2,400 3rd and 4th grade students at 37 schools in the region. Trunks contain 12 screen-free social studies lessons rooted in the story of Tacoma's settlement and its impacts, beginning with the tribes here since time immemorial and continuing beyond the arrival of the railroad, including interactive lessons on the Oregon Trail and the contributions of early immigrant groups. Trunks are maintained by our staff and volunteers, including a dedicated volunteer who handcrafts all of the covered wagons for a lesson in which students cooperatively pack their wagons for their seven or eight month journey. 3. Traveling Storytimes: Our Traveling Storytime program brings heritage crafts, accessible history education, and cooperative games to preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade classrooms. Highly in demand, the program won the 2024 Education Award from Pierce County Heritage League in its inaugural season. This school year (2024-2025), we have reached 1,700 young learners through 88 Storytimes. Teachers come back to our programming year after year. While we do participate in back to school events for teachers and share our opportunities widely in the school district, word of mouth is one of our most powerful marketing tools. This year, we introduced a 7th grade program called "Diverse Perspectives in Tacoma's History," designed to align with Tacoma Public School curriculum on the contributions of tribes, settlers, and immigrants to our city's early history. We piloted the "visiting field trip" lesson at Hunt Middle School and shortly thereafter, a teacher at another local school reached out to ask that we come to his classroom. Our educational program is expansive, especially considering our small size. In addition to our local, in-person offerings, we maintain an expertly researched blog and YouTube videos that serve students across the nation. Our YouTube content saw over 4,000 views this month alone, primarily from school groups, and some of our Oregon Trail videos have over 60,000 views. This winter, we received a letter from a 5th grader from Rhode Island asking detailed questions about hunting on the frontier. We are always excited to see that our materials make a difference both locally and further afield, and this reach fits with our vision. By engaging students with Tacoma’s complex history, we aim to connect them to the wider story of America and foster a sense of global citizenship that builds connection, purpose, and meaning across generations and cultures. At a time when many of us are experiencing what the US Surgeon General calls “an epidemic of loneliness,” building connection to place and people is essential, beginning with our youngest community members. PUBLIC PROGRAMMING: In addition to the educational programs that make up the core of our work, we offer two free, family-friendly community festivals that provide opportunities to experience the heritage skills that sustained life in the 19th century. This year's Old Town Craft & Music Fest also featured 4 local acoustic bands and 3 Tacoma Public School choirs, offering the kind of entertainment and connection people would have experienced in Tacoma's early days. We welcomed over 450 people from all over the city to Old Town Park, along with 8 community partners. One of our visitors shared, "My four year old loved washing the clothes, being inside the cabin, and making hard tack. The hammering nails and pounding the letters for print was also a highlight. Incredible experience - we had so much fun exploring how people lived 100 years ago!" At Tacoma Fiber Fling, the focus is on fiber arts, with interactive demonstrations that include spinning wheels, weaving, plant dyeing, quilting, knitting, crocheting, sewing, needleworking, felting, and basket weaving. Live, local music brings energy to the Old Town stage, while demonstrators and vendors bring with them a variety of cultural traditions, reflecting our diverse community and inspiring a multifaceted sense of place. This inclusive celebration of fiber arts draws a bridge between the past and present, connecting us across generations and cultures.