In Step with Teresa André: ‘Pavement and Plucky Girls: 1920s Tales from Washington’s First Highway’
By Richard Hao, Youth Director At Large
Edited by Laura Lee Bennett, Executive Vice President Photos by Cheryl Magnuson and Teresa André
On September 12, 2026, the Redmond Historical Society welcomed storyteller and Humanities Washington speaker Teresa André, who traveled across Washington State sharing discoveries from her journey along the Yellowstone Trail—including Redmond’s own Red Brick Road!
Dressed in “flapper” garb, Teresa brought to life the civic leaders, provocateurs, labor leaders, and local characters who made headlines to put their towns on the map—as well as the fearless women who took to the road. She also brought along a “mini-museum” of artifacts from the era.
More than 90 Society members and local history enthusiasts attended, making it a grand kickoff to the Fall ‘26 Saturday Speaker Series at our new venue, the Redmond Library.
We caught up with Teresa for a bit of Q&A.
RHS: What got you into history?
Teresa André: I’ve always been into history. My big brother read books to me when I was very little, and he always picked historical books. I think he went a little overboard, though. He had me sitting down and reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace with him when I was nine, so we had to backtrack from that. But the whole idea of learning about the past through stories has intrigued me forever.
RHS: When did you start giving tours?
Teresa André: I started when I was fourteen years old. My very first tour was of an old mansion, guiding people up to the widow’s walk. This was in Connecticut, looking out at the Connecticut River, and I explained to people how pioneer women would wait there for their men to come back from the sea. That did it for me. I loved wearing the period costume, telling people the stories, and putting myself into the shoes of a woman longing for her husband to come back. Of course, I was fourteen, so I romanticized everything. But that was the beginning. I ended up taking a different path of study in college, but I worked in museums all through college and ended up right back on this path.
RHS: What about local history in particular has drawn your attention?
Teresa André: We moved here from New York State, and coming from New York, it was a completely different cultural experience. The landscape was a big part of it. I live in Eastern Washington now, and in New York I lived among mountains and trees and villages. Then I moved to Eastern Washington, living among sagebrush and sand. One thing we noticed is that people here are so friendly. They look at you and they talk to you. That was one of the factors in our decision to move out West, after my husband received a job offer here.
For me, a way to know the present is to understand what has come before. I had been working in museums for many years, so it was natural to gravitate toward museum work. That work introduced me to the history of the local society and economy [and provided context]. Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, for example, draw a lot of their history from the World War II era. In Richland in particular, where we first moved, most people had not been here for generations. They came for a specific purpose―to work. They didn’t have extended families. They didn’t have a network. Everybody was from someplace else, and so they had to build families by choice. They had to bond together as a community very, very quickly. I think that has carried through the generations since the World War II generation. It has become a way of life: you get to know people, you talk to them, you look at them, and you find out their stories, their history. I just take it one step further and go backwards into history, pulling out the stories of people from long ago.
“For me, a way to know the present is to understand what has come before."
– Teresa André
RHS: What’s the difference between a storyteller and a historian, or are they pretty much the same thing?
Teresa André: There’s a difference. I resist being called a historian because I’m not trained in the classical techniques of historical study, though I use a lot of the same tools. Sometimes I add my personality into it, where a historian might be more strait-laced. I like to extrapolate emotions and possible motives, but I always make it clear that I’m storytelling―which means that sometimes you should take what I say with a grain of salt. Still, I’m as truthful to the historical facts as I can be. I’m a very good researcher, but my focus is the people of the times, not necessarily all the socioeconomic forces or the wars. I like to look at the individual.
RHS: You shared a lot of anecdotes in your presentation at the Redmond Library. Is there one you’d like to highlight, from the Yellowstone Trail or otherwise?
Teresa André: Oh, I just love all the stories. But because the program is called “Pavement and Plucky Girls,” the women’s stories resonate with me the most. I couldn’t include everything I found, so I cherry-picked the ones that made it into the presentation. Otherwise, we would have been there a couple more hours.
The idea that a woman could not travel alone without a male escort―without it being considered unusual, that young ladies could actually be arrested in some states for traveling without one―makes us think about how far we’ve come. Our society isn’t perfect, and there are still a lot of gender and racial inequalities among them. But I also don’t want to lose sight of how far we have come. It amazes me, sometimes it amuses me, and sometimes I just have to shake my head to think that this was once the norm. I’m so glad we’ve gotten beyond some of these [ideas].
RHS: Did these stereotypes cause difficulties in your research? Were women less represented in the records?
Teresa André: A lot of my main records were newspaper stories, and when you look at the style of newspaper writing [of this era], particularly the 1920s, it was very subjective and judgmental. Sometimes it was an eyebrow-raiser, sometimes it was amusing, and sometimes it was just annoying to see that the norm was to pigeonhole women.
But look what happened during that era: women won the right to vote. I use that word very specifically. They won the right to vote because they fought for it. They were not given the right to vote. As you read, you have to be aware of the bias of the writer.
A current Humanities Washington program explores women’s clothing—following a past program on pockets, this one focuses on women’s underwear. Something as basic as that doesn't come out in the research unless you’re really poking around and looking for something different from your own norm, because we tend to think certain things have always been true. When we find something that isn’t, you keep pulling at [the thread], and you learn more and more. We can’t put it all into one presentation, but it’s so much fun.
RHS: Where do you find these newspaper sources? Are they public records?
Teresa André: I spend a lot of time in archives, but one of the best resources is online, through Chronicling America. This is a digital collections site hosted by the Library of Congress. You can search this website and find all kinds of newspapers. What’s also nice is that they’ve done the work on copyrights. They state that, as far as they know, the information they make available is publicly usable for research, presentations, and scholarship. That helps, because sorting out copyright and fair use can be difficult, and it’s an area where I really try to stay on the right side. Much of the content hosted on Chronicling America is in the public domain.
RHS: What advice would you give people who are interested in storytelling? What makes your stories really pop?
Teresa André: I identify with the stories as I’m telling them. I put myself into those people’s positions. I try to see through their eyes and be in that time frame. Don't just look for the material you're going to write or talk about. Take the time to understand the broader context, and what’s going on in society. What movies are people watching? What books are they reading? What household chores are they doing? If you can step out of yourself and into that time, you can portray it better than if you’re simply reciting somebody else’s story. It becomes part of your story.
I also encourage people to look at their own story and their family’s story. I give people a little homework in my handout. I ask them: Was there a plucky girl in your family tree? How did the changing societal norms of the 1920s influence your family? For me, that was easy. My dad was born in 1919, so my grandmother was a young woman during this time. Unfortunately, by the time I became interested, she had already passed, but I’d always been intensely interested in people, so I do have some of her stories.
I also ask: Did your grandmother or great-grandmother drive? It seems like a silly question. Almost everybody I know drives, unless they live in a big city with public transportation. It wouldn’t even occur to me that I might not be allowed to drive. And: How did your village, town, or city change with the improvement of roads? Did local businesses grow? Again, we take it for granted that we can go anywhere we want and there will be a paved road, unless you're hiking into the wilderness, and that’s a recreational choice. I want people to think beyond what we see as our everyday norms and see what their norms were. When you hear their stories that way, they take on a totally different flavor.
The other thing I include in my handout is a vocabulary list, since vocabulary changes over time. It wasn’t all that different, except we don’t normally refer to an expensive car as a “Super,” and we don’t talk much about “moonshiners,” though I think most people know what those are.
However, one word that did not occur to me to include―which I will in the future―is “plucky.” Someone came up to me and asked what it meant, and it took me aback, because that's an adjective my family would have used. We just know what it means. But coming up with a definition was really difficult. I looked it up, and I didn’t like the definition I found, which was something like, “showing courage, bravery, or determination in the face of difficulty.” Yes, but there’s more to it than that. I want to use the words “feisty” or “spunky,” but then I’d have to define those too. That’s something I need to think through. I know inside what a plucky girl is, but actually defining it is difficult.
Teresa André's “mini-museum” of artifacts from the era.
RHS: What’s the most fun or interesting image or artifact you found? My favorite was the dog in the circle.
Teresa André: I love that one. I just love collecting things, and each item tells a story.
I’ll tell you what surprised me: the cigarette holders, and how thin the cigarettes would have been. They weren’t thick like they are now, with a big filter.
“I just love collecting things, and each item tells a story."
– Teresa
I also liked the ballot box. I found an Odd Fellows ballot box, and one of the buildings on Leary Road is an old Odd Fellows Hall, which was on the Yellowstone Trail. So having a ballot box from the Odd Fellows was pretty cool. They’d have black balls and white balls, and the box would be passed in front of the members, and each could put in a white or a black one, depending on whether they were voting Yes or No. This is probably where the expression “to blackball someone” comes from. It means you’re going to exclude them, not allow them to be part of something. I like how one thing leads to another, and another.
I also liked the labels from the soda company. I can’t imagine drinking celery soda.
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