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Where It Is and Why People Live There
Orting sits in the Puyallup River Valley in Pierce County, about twenty miles southeast of Tacoma, in a flat alluvial basin entirely surrounded by the lower slopes of the Cascade foothills and dominated, on clear days, by the massive white presence of Mount Rainier to the southeast. It is an extraordinarily beautiful setting, which partially explains why people live there, and an extraordinarily precarious one, which explains why the emergency preparedness plans for the town are among the most elaborate in Washington State. The Puyallup River, which runs directly through Orting, originates on the glaciers of Rainier, and in the event of a major eruption or lahar — a volcanic mudflow — the valley floor would be in the direct path of the debris. The town conducts regular evacuation drills. People live there anyway, which tells you something about the relationship between the beautiful and the dangerous that Pacific Northwest geography repeatedly enforces.
The valley itself is exceptional farmland — the Puyallup Valley is famous throughout Washington for its daffodils and tulips and its berry crops, the volcanic soil and the river-bottom moisture combining to produce agricultural conditions that drew farmers from the beginning of settlement. The town was platted in 1877 and grew steadily through the 1880s, fed by the agricultural prosperity of the valley and, after 1877, by the Northern Pacific Railroad, which selected Tacoma as its western terminus and built lines through the Puyallup Valley toward the mountain passes.
The Washington State Soldiers Home: Founding and Admission
The decision that made Orting more than a farming town was taken in Olympia in 1889, when the new Washington State Constitution included a provision that the state legislature would maintain a soldiers' home for honorably discharged Union soldiers, sailors, and marines who were bona fide citizens of Washington. The Washington Soldiers' Home opened in March 1891, the first of what would eventually be four veterans' homes in the state, and the first member was admitted on July 4th of that year — a date chosen with the self-conscious symbolism that the era applied to everything connecting the Civil War generation to the national founding.
Orting was selected as the site partly because the railroads came through it — access to transportation being, in 1891, the practical foundation of any institution that needed to be reached from the rest of the state. The home was built on the southeast edge of town, its grounds arranged as a campus with housing, a hospital, a chapel, and the administrative buildings that a residential institution required. Veterans came from across Washington to live out their years in an organised community of their peers, men who had served in the Civil War and the Indian campaigns and the various other military actions of the mid-nineteenth century and who had arrived, old and in many cases infirm, in the newest state in the union.
Admission to the home was not casual. An applicant had to provide evidence of honorable discharge, proof of military service with his unit and the dates of enlistment and discharge, and documentation of disability or indigence. The cause of discharge mattered. The home was for men who had served the Union — the Washington Constitution specified "Union soldiers, sailors, marines, and members of the state militia" — and the records kept on admission were meticulous. Those records, preserved in the Washington State Archives, contain pension depositions and service histories and the accumulated testimony of men who had spent decades putting the war behind them and were now, in old age, required to reconstruct it in official form.
Andrew Jackson Foster at Orting
Andrew Jackson Foster — son of Jared Foster of South Carolina and Dorcas Moseley — was enrolled at the Washington Soldiers' Home in Orting and is buried in the long rows of the home's cemetery, in the company of the other men who had carried the Union cause through the border wars of Missouri and Kansas and come out the other side very old and far from home. He died on December 24th, 1928, at the age of eighty-six. When he enrolled at the home he listed his parents as Jared Foster and Dorcus Moseley of South Carolina — writing her name down one last time, in a government office, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to remember exactly where you came from, even after a lifetime of moving away from it.
The home's cemetery holds the graves of hundreds of men whose stories followed similar arcs — the war, the westward migration, the long trailing-off of a military generation into old age in a country that had become, by the time they arrived in it, nearly unrecognisable from the one they had fought for. They are buried in rows, the headstones uniform, the individual histories compressed into the standard abbreviations of military record. The staff at the home, when families come looking, can direct them to the pension files, where the real stories live.
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