About

About Lowell

The school that would eventually become Lowell was first opened in 1869 as a one-room schoolhouse built from logs. It was located on the corner of what is now N. 28th and Starr streets and was the first school built in the area. As the city of Tacoma grew (and competed with the then-separate city of New Tacoma) and other schools were built, the school became known as the “First Ward” school, its district encompassing the area of Old Town. In 1890, the school was renamed and became Lowell School, after the poet James Russell Lowell.

The school has been rebuilt and expanded several times over the years, due to overcrowding issues, a devastating earthquake, and an aging building. Still, Lowell remains, and with a new building scheduled to be open in 2026, will continue to be there as a place for future generations to learn and make their own history.

For more information about the history of Lowell, please view the “History” tab in the menu above.

About This Project

This page was created as a personal project. I am a former Lowell student, having attended for six years from 1994-2000, and I have fond memories of my time there. To this day, I am still friends with a few people I met there. After watching the demolition of the school begin in December 2024, I started thinking about the school’s long history. I was curious about what it used to look like, before the the building from 1951. I wanted to know more. I’ve always loved history – especially the history of Tacoma – and the research process is fun for me.

Having just graduated in December 2024 with a Master’s degree in archiving and records management, I have found that I not only enjoy researching, but that I am also passionate about sharing that research and information, making it available to others who might also be interested. It’s always challenging to figure out the best way of doing that, but it’s a problem I enjoy trying to solve.

I’ve spent days going through Tacoma’s newspaper archive on Newspapers.com, trawling the digital repository on the Tacoma Public Library’s website, looking at old maps on the Library of Congress website, digging through the old school websites with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and sorting through my own photo collection to find things to put here and fit together the pieces of Lowell’s history.

I think of this website as a digital scrapbook, chronicling over 150 years of Lowell’s existence.

Some photos of me as a Lowell kindergartner, in Ms. Pelegruti’s morning class.