MAKING SENSE OF OLYMPIA

A tough time

David Scherer Water in downtown Olympia during the tough spring of 2003.

Courtesy of Keith Jewell

Posted Wednesday, August 12, 2026 3:10 pm

David Scherer Water

By David Scherer Water

Two of Olympia's most defining modern-era losses happened less than a hundred days apart.

In 2003, Rachel Corrie and the Olympia Brewery came to a sudden end almost simultaneously — briefly pausing this city's two hearts: the moral-global Olympia and the industrial-local one.

Rachel Corrie was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza on March 16, 2003, while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home. When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began four days later, Olympia became an epicenter for Northwest antiwar organizing. Demonstrations erupted overnight, and Corrie’s death charged the city's streets with an emotional urgency.

Rather than letting the tragedy define the story, her family established the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice to continue the work Rachel believed in. It quickly grew into one of the city's most enduring civic institutions — ensuring Olympia’s response to profound loss wasn't just solemn remembrance, but institutional action.

Three months later, on June 20, the Olympia Brewing Company permanently shut down after more than a century of operation, pulling the plug on the region’s defining industrial identity.

The collapse of the timber economy was already echoing through Thurston County culturally and financially. The brewery closure felt like the final notification that working-class South Sound was officially being phased out.

Unlike Corrie’s legacy, the brewery’s sprawling industrial complex has spent the last 1,200 weeks producing nothing but rust, graffiti, and weeds: a towering, million-square-foot relic brooding quietly above Tumwater Falls.

Nationally, it was a time of heavy exits: Elliott Smith, Mr. Rogers, Johnny Cash, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Hope, Nina Simone, Charles Bronson, the Space Shuttle Columbia — and the launch of MySpace, which quietly introduced us to an entirely new kind of loss.

Two things died during that period in Olympia.

One became a movement.

We still haven't figured out what to do with the other.

David Scherer Water writes his column on a yellow 1973 IBM Selectric II. He then reads his first draft out loud into a smart phone, sends it as an email to himself where it goes through a final polish before reaching you. As the world moves deeper into words churned out by robots, David remains committed to an off-line brain, a stack of paper, and the friction of ink. Please support his work by becoming a free or paid subscriber to his Substack.

Comments

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KellyOReilly

Wow, David, although I wasn't living in WA at the time, your column certainly took me back to my memories of that time. I remember hearing about Rachel Corrie's murder on KPFK, one of LA's public radio stations. I also remember participating in several anti-war marches during 2003.

Wednesday, August 12 Report this
Snevets

Thank you for a not so long ago.

Thursday, August 13 Report this
tacomagirl

Hi David. I volunteered at the Oly Crisis Clinic for 3 years with a female friend, During some of that time. Rachel vol on the teen line and the same time. we were all on the same shift, same room. at opposite ends. Virginia Frost

Wednesday, August 19 Report this

A tough time

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