"In the Valley, Near the Water" are the first words of Chimacum High School's Alma Mater song. Written by Duane Montgomery, cherished music director, those words have a special meaning for Chimacum residents.

Published in 2023 by local historian Nancy L. McDaniel, Chimacum: In the Valley Near the Water provides an intimate local history of the Chimacum Valley and its surrounding agricultural communities on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The narrative chronicles the area's transition from ancestral indigenous homelands to a bustling hub of pioneer farming, timber harvesting, and dairy production driven by 19th-century homesteaders. Drawing on extensive family archives, oral histories, and photographs, the book meticulously reconstructs the daily lives, schoolhouses, and community networks of early settlers. A keen insight drawn from the text is how its granular, bottom-up preservation of rural genealogy reveals the quiet, persistent labor required to carve an agrarian society out of a heavily forested frontier, offering a localized counterweight to grand narratives of Pacific Northwest expansion.