Editor’s note: this is the fourth profile of Sequim Irrigation Festival pioneers leading up to the 123rd festival set for May 4-13.
For more than 60 years, Lorelle Agostine has made the Sequim Irrigation Festival’s Grand Parade a tradition.
She hasn’t missed a parade since moving here in 1951 and she turned 90 this year a few months before riding in the parade as an honorary pioneer, which she says is an honor.
Lorelle and her husband Bill raised nine children in Sequim with all of them going to Sequim Public Schools.
She’s lived off Taylor Cuttoff Road since 1956 on 10 acres across from the Dungeness River. Lorelle said she felt like a pioneer after first moving to Sequim saying her family lived off the land with a large garden and also fishing, crabbing, clamming, and hunting pheasants and deer in the area.
Originally, Lorelle was born in LaGrange, Georgia, and went on to graduate from the University of Georgia High School. She became a cadet nurse in Nashville from 1945-1948 and in 1949 moved to Sioux City, Iowa, to work as a pediatric and OB nurse.
There she met Don and Mabel Sorensen, a former honorary pioneer, and through them her eventual husband Bill Agostine. The couple fell in love, married, and later moved to Sequim in 1951. Bill passed away in 1983, but they have 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren together.
In her career, Lorelle helped deliver a lot of children working as an OB nurse at Olympic Memorial Hospital from 1961-1988.
After retiring, she’s stayed busy volunteering at the Sequim-Dungeness Hospital Guild Thrift Shop, going to church at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, gardening, playing bridge and dressing up for events as Buttons the Clown.
She’s also traveled the globe including Rome a few times, Italy, Moscow and across Europe. After the festival, she plans to travel to Hawaii.
Lorelle said she and her kids always look forward to the festival and that “living in Sequim has been the best move we ever made.”
For more information on Irrigation Festival events, visit www.irrigationfestival.com.
