Bigelow House Museum

An 1854 Carpenter Gothic home built by Daniel Bigelow, one of Olympia's earliest settlers, now a museum with original territorial-era furnishings.

The Bigelow House is the oldest surviving residence in Olympia and one of the earliest still standing in the Pacific Northwest, built in 1854 by Daniel Richardson Bigelow and his wife Ann Elizabeth White. Bigelow was born in 1824 in Ellisburg, New York, graduated from Union College in 1846, and studied law at Harvard before crossing the Oregon Trail in 1851 with his law books and a massive walnut desk loaded onto the covered wagon. After determining Portland already had enough lawyers, he sailed north on the schooner Exact to the new settlement at Olympia, where he filed a land claim on 160 acres east of town near an artesian spring overlooking Budd Inlet on Puget Sound. A gifted orator, his July 4, 1852 speech helped galvanize the movement to separate Washington Territory from Oregon, earning him the title "Father of Washington Territory." He drew up the territorial constitution at that same walnut desk he had hauled across the continent. Elected to the first Territorial Legislature in 1854, Bigelow advocated for women's voting rights decades before suffrage became a national movement.

The two-story Carpenter Gothic home was built on a foundation of whole cedar logs that had been charred to sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter, a technique borrowed from Northwest Native peoples who used fire-hardened wood for canoe construction. Daniel and Ann Elizabeth raised eight children in the house, including Evaline, who lived to be 102, and Ruth, who was born in the house in 1860 and never left it, living there for her entire 90 years until her death in 1950. The family's progressive convictions made the house a gathering place for reformers. On October 18, 1871, Susan B. Anthony and Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway dined at the Bigelow House while Anthony was in Olympia to become the first woman to address the Washington Territorial Legislature. Anthony wrote in her diary that evening: "Dine at Judge Bigelow's - his wife splendid." A commemorative plaque now marks the occasion, and family lore holds that one parlor armchair is the very seat in which Anthony sat. The next day, Anthony addressed a packed chamber, while Bigelow himself had introduced a bill allowing women to vote.

Daniel Bigelow died on September 15, 1905, at age 81 -- the last surviving member of that first territorial legislature. Ann Elizabeth, an accomplished businesswoman who managed the family's extensive land holdings, lived until 1926. Three generations of Bigelows occupied the house continuously from the 1850s until 2005, when the final descendants departed and it became fully open as a museum, still furnished almost entirely with original family belongings.

Museum staff closing the building at night have reported encounters with an apparition they describe as a distinguished gentleman in period attire who appears to be scrutinizing the displays with intense concentration. The figure examines artifacts methodically, moving from case to case as if inspecting whether each item has been properly preserved, then vanishes the moment anyone approaches. Visitors touring the museum have also reported unexplained sounds, including footsteps in rooms confirmed to be empty. The ghost is widely believed to be Daniel Bigelow himself, the Harvard-educated lawyer and territorial founding father who spent over fifty years in the house and whose desk, books, and personal effects still fill its rooms. Given that three generations of Bigelows were born, lived, and died within these walls -- and that the house was continuously occupied by the same family for over 150 years -- the attachment to the property runs deep enough to explain why someone might never truly leave.

The Bigelow House Museum is open to the public for guided tours through the Olympia Historical Society, which merged with the Bigelow House Preservation Association in 2013. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The Library of Congress holds detailed documentation of the house through its Historic American Buildings Survey, preserving architectural drawings and photographs of one of the Pacific Northwest's most significant pioneer-era homes.