Vicki Cresap was born on Aug. 28, 1920. Last week, she hit the century and a half a decade mark while celebrating her 105th birthday surrounded by family and friends.
Cresap and the generations after grew up in the Battle Ground area, around the Bell Mountain area near Battle Ground Lake, her daughter, Gloria Walck, said. Walck, being 83-years-old, is incredibly grateful to still have a living parent.
“It’s amazing, with tears in my eyes, because I’m one of the fortunate ones,” Walck said. “None of my friends have their mom, and I do, so I share her with all my friends.”
Cresap maintained housewife status throughout her whole life, but with her extensive knowledge of the area, having lived it and seen the changes more so than practically anybody else in north Clark County.
“We love Battle Ground because we’ve been there a long time, seen lots of changes,” Walck said. “Mom has seen a lot more changes than I have, you know. Through the depression and World War II and all that. She became a housewife and enjoyed all the things that entailed going to the barn dance, dancing over at Battle Ground Lake, camping, mom and dad went to Alaska when National Geographic filmed the rafting of the Yukon and they were involved in that. So I traveled a little bit. When daddy retired, but as far as Battle Ground, she couldn’t think of any other better place to live.”
According to a Historylink.org post by Bill Alley, Clark County was dubbed the prune capital of the world. In 1925, the Washington State Legislature removed the “e” in Clarke County. In 1927, Clark County Sheriff Lester Wood was shot and killed during a raid on a moonshine still in Dole Valley, east of Battle Ground. Needless to say, the decade Cresap was born, packed a lot of events that have turned into century-old history.
Walck said her mother turned into quite the historian with her firsthand knowledge of the growth in rural Clark County surrounding the Battle Ground area.
“She was a member of the Rebecca’s and she worked with Louise Tucker on the history and the time capsule and things like that,” Walck said.
Walck said her mother was very involved with the community of Battle Ground and was a great mother raising her kids to be good kids, as well as taking good care of Walck’s father.
“She was one of seven kids; she had four brothers and two sisters,” Walck said. “And then of course the Cresaps, there were 12 kids, so there were lots of relatives around.”
Cresap celebrated her birthday on Thursday, Aug. 28, for a couple of hours at a Vancouver assisted living center with cake and cookies with the number 105 on them, a rare age. After the 2020 census, the estimated number of people in the United States living to be 105 years or older was approximately one in every 30,000 U.S. residents, according to various centenarian statistics.
