A photo of John Miller Murphy taken in 1889.
Courtesy Photo
By David Scherer Water
John Miller Murphy arrived in the Pacific Northwest as a child after crossing the plains in 1850 and grew up in pioneer Olympia.
He knew many of the city’s founders personally. A lot of what we know today about Levi Smith and Edmund Sylvester, the very first settlers of our city, comes from John Miller Murphy.
He delivered papers, apprenticed as a printer, worked as a theater critic, and eventually founded the Washington Standard in 1860, one of Olympia's earliest, longest-running, and most influential newspapers.
Murphy was one of those formative figures whose fingerprints are all over Washington’s territorial history, even though almost nobody outside local history circles remembers him now.
He wrote continuously for over 50 years and famously boasted, “Not a single issue of the Standard ever goes out without more or less editorial matter from my pen.”
His chaotic political trajectory is very Olympia. He initially aligned with the Lincoln Republicans during the Civil War, but later drifted into Democratic politics during Reconstruction-era disputes while simultaneously functioning as a kind of civic chronicler beyond party lines.
He was also a politician — elected to the Olympia City Council, representing Thurston County in the territorial legislature, and serving as territorial auditor. His newspaper held to a strict policy of misspelling the names of anyone who ran against him.
His weekly column, Mere Mention, ran for five decades. It blended gossip, local observation, boosterism, humor, territorial politics, and tiny details of everyday life. Murphy specialized in terse absurdity and anthropological microdosing. He was Olympia’s Herb Caen — only we had ours decades before San Francisco.
Fascinated by local personalities and obsessed with Olympia weirdness, Murphy spent decades holding up a mirror to the city. His column was a work of recollection, oral history, gossip, and civic mythmaking.
The Feb. 8, 1889 issue of Mere Mention reads like a dispatch from a city that still hasn't entirely grown up:
Two well defined earthquake shocks were felt in the city at twenty minutes to six o'clock P.M. last night, the sixth instance.
Giles market and Hadlan's Beer Hall were entered Sunday night by some enterprising scamp who tapped the respective tills for small amounts. Hadlan was awakened by the noise and entered the rear door just as the miscreant left through the transom.
The newfangled seats at the school are queer things. The students say, they are too narrow for two young men and much worse in that respect for two young ladies, but just a perfect fit for a young man and a young lady.
If the purser of the steamer, Potter had no more sense than to use the words given by Mr. James Ratcliffe to the INTELLIGENCER reporter a few days ago, that "any kind of an old tub was good enough for a d - - - d old mossgrown place like Olympia," the Oregon Railway and Navigation Co., owes it to itself, as well as the people of the city slandered, to incontinently “fire" that officer from their service. It seems strange that anybody who has arrived at years of discretion should have been guilty of making such an unjust remark, but we have no reason to doubt the report coming from the source it does. It is a remarkable fact, however, that such talk, almost inevitably emanates from those lowest in authority, for even if steamboats were selling at ten cents each, they’d scarcely be able to buy a gang-plank.
A number of strangers in plug hats are taking in the lay of the land in Tumwater.
The recently arrived bell destined to proclaim the hours from the Odd Fellows Temple weighs 500 pounds.
A bright meteor passing over Olympia towards the Northern sky got tangled in the Bear's tail.
Murphy straddled two worlds: rough frontier life and the rise of institutional Washington State culture. Few Olympians were better positioned to watch the transformation.
In 1892, on the corner of 4th and Cherry — now the site of City Hall — Murphy built Olympia’s first major performance venue: an ornate four-story, thousand-seat opera house. The baroque behemoth made little sense for a fledgling western capital where the legislature still met in a primitive shack built in 1856. John Philip Sousa played, Mark Twain read essays, and in grand Olympia style, the leviathan was smashed with a wrecking ball.
Laughing my way through surviving editions of Mere Mention, I connect with a philosopher ancestor.
For 50 years, Murphy tried to explain Olympia to itself.
I'm beginning to suspect I've joined the family business.
More than a century later, I'm still wandering these old streets, collecting new stories.
David Scherer Water recently built a microphone out of an old Olympia Beer can and has been seen downtown interviewing residents, gathering new insights for this column, and recording Olympia history in real time. Support David’s work by becoming a free or paid subscriber to his Substack.
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