Sep. 12—Spokane residents have a rare opportunity Monday afternoon: the original Washington state constitution will be on display for what is believed to be the first time east of the Cascades in the state’s 136-year history.
“It is our duty and obligation to the people of Washington to preserve and make accessible significant documents that helped shape our state and how we live our lives,” Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement Thursday. “Washingtonians will have the opportunity to connect with a formative piece of their history that they otherwise may not have had. We want to bring their history to them.”
The document will be on display on the third floor of the Central Spokane Library from 3 to 5 p.m. on Monday. The free event will include remarks from Hobbs, and attendees will be allowed to take non-flash photos with the document. Members of the Washington State Patrol will be on hand to ensure the document’s safety.
The document’s visit to Spokane coincides with Constitution Week, an annual weeklong recognition of the 1787 signing of the U.S. Constitution.
“We really want to make sure that everyone in Washington has the opportunity to connect with our history,” state Archivist Heather Hirotaka said in an interview Friday. “We don’t want that to just be limited to Western Washington.”
As archivist, Hirotaka is tasked with ensuring the constitution, along with approximately 250,000 cubic feet of other documents, are safely stored across five branches in the state. Additionally, the state archive holds millions of electronic records, with 20.7 million digital records joining the archive between July 2024 to June 2025.
But it’s the state’s founding document that is perhaps the most historically significant in the collection.
Drafted in 1889, the constitution lays out important details on how Washington would operate as a state across its 78 pages of vellum paper, including the rights residents would enjoy, the design of the Washington state seal and the responsibilities and terms for each state official.
Notably, the document only designated Olympia as the “temporary location” of the state capitol, as delegates from Eastern and Central Washington continued to push for the cities of Ellensburg and North Yakima to serve as the home of the state’s government.
The constitution was written by 75 delegates, including lawyers, doctors, bankers and teachers, and after 77% of the area’s territory voted for its ratification, the approval by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison on November 11, 1889, officially allowed Washington to join the union as the 42nd state.
Once on display in various locations around the state Capitol campus, the document has since moved to a secure facility for storage after it began to show “some deterioration.”
“So, at that time, they moved it across the street to the state archives where we could really maintain its environmental factors,” Hirotaka said.
While occasionally on display for special occasions, including the start of a new legislative session, the founding document is now typically kept within a safe inside of a vault in the main state archive building. The environment is consistently kept at 60 degrees with 40% humidity, which Hirotaka said are the “optimal archival conditions for a document like that.”
“And that’s one of the reasons that we don’t want to bring it out often, because we want to make sure that we’re mindful of those environmental factors, right? Heat, humidity, light exposure,” Hirotaka said.
To transport the document safely to Eastern Washington, the Secretary of State’s office coordinated an escort from the Washington State Patrol for the roughly five-and-a-half-hour drive from the main archive in Olympia to one of the archive’s satellite locations in Cheney. Following the trip, the document was immediately placed inside a vault ahead of its public display on Monday.
“It’s got lots of protection, and lots of people with eyes on it, to make sure that it stays nice and safe,” Hirotaka said.
Hirotaka said the display is a part of the archive’s push to “connect people to history and records that are meaningful for them.”
“We’re always happy to be out and about, and to be able to share things, and this is really a historic moment to be able to come to Spokane with this founding document and to be able to share it,” Hirotaka said. “So, we’re happy to be here.”