Events at Fort Steilacoom
EXPERIENCE THE SMELLS, SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF A WORKING FORT
Experience life in the past lane at Fort Steilacoom. The museum offers a selection of annual events, including living history events and lecture series, so that guests may learn more about the history of the fort and its impact on the local community.
2024 & 2025 Programs
Do you enjoy volunteering for history?
We sometimes hear from people that they’d like to volunteer, whether because they love volunteering, or appreciate Puget Sound history – or something in between.
We ask all prospective volunteers to come by on the first Sunday of the month from 1 to 4, in order to meet some of the current volunteers. It’s free to stop by and say hi!
If you appreciate the history but live outside the region, we certainly appreciate “remote” volunteers – email us to say hello.
Of course, we’re open the first Sunday of every month for tours. Book here.
4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024: Christmas at Fort Steilacoom. Living historians will re-enact a 19th Century Christmas season as it might have been celebrated in our buildings 165 years ago. Re-enactors will gather in candlelight to talk, sing, dance and dine as our predecessors did in the first U.S. military post in Puget Sound. Visitors from 2024 will walk past and witness scenes as if the visitors are spirits from the future.
You can read more about the event in last year’s news announcement. The event will sell out. Tickets are on sale now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/christmas-at-historic-fort-steilacoom-1861-in-2024-tickets-1086615178249?aff=oddtdtcreator
Upcoming talks in our 175th anniversary series:
All meetings will be on Zoom. Do not go to the fort.
- 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17: The Military Units that Served at Fort Steilacoom, 1849 – 1868. Alan Archambault has had a life-long interest in history and is presently a freelance historian-illustrator. He worked in the museum field for over forty years and was director of the Fort Lewis Museum for twenty one of those years.
- Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025: The Discovery of the Salish Sea 10,000 BCE to 1860m Pawn in a Global Chess Match. Local historian and longtime fort volunteer Steve Dunkelberger will talk the discoveries of Puget Sound before the U.S. Army’s arrival
- Sunday, Feb. 23: Kalapuyans of the Willamette Valley. Oregon State University Asst. Prof. David G. Lewis, PhD, is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, a descendant of the Takelma, Chinook, Molalla, and Santiam Kalapuya peoples of western Oregon. We at Fort Steilacoom talk and study a lot about what was going on in Washington during settlement; Prof. Lewis, who has a new book out, will talk about what was going on in Oregon during those same years.
- 2 p.m. Sunday, March 16: The History of Fort Vancouver. The very first Army post in Washington was established a few months before Fort Steilacoom: Fort Vancouver. Military historian Jeff Davis will talk about the history of that fort, perhaps most famous because a young officer named Ulysses Grant was stationed there. But the fort played an important part in Washington history.