Topic: Agriculture
The Columbia Basin Project (CBP) is the nation's second-largest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project. At 670,000 acres under irrigation as of 2021, the project is still unfinished, as more th...
In early 1952, W. Gale Matthews -- a resident of Grant County since 1890 and, at the time of this account, President of the Grant County Title Abstract Company -- provided his memories of the beginnin...
In 1928, Thomas Graham (1868-1946) wrote a series of articles in the Colville Examiner titled "50 Years Ago," recounting his experiences and observations as a teenager in the Colville Valley. His fami...
This essay by Christopher Wiley on the development of the combine harvester won the 2010 Washington State History Day award presented by HistoryLink.org for Outstanding Essay on Washington State Histo...
The City of Connell is located in Franklin County, about 35 miles north of Pasco. Connell is known for its parks, school district, corrections center, and neighborhoods. The town, originally called Pa...
In 2016, milk was the second highest valued commodity in Washington behind apples, with some 90 percent of the milk produced in the state also processed there. The first substantial herd of cattle arr...
Randall A. Johnson wrote this article about Palouse pioneer James S. "Cashup" Davis in 1968 for The Pacific Northwesterner, the quarterly publication of the Spokane Westerners Corral. Johnson was born...
In 1851, soon after crossing the Oregon Trail from Illinois with the Denny Party, David Denny and Louisa Boren settled at Alki Point (West Seattle). They were among the first EuroAmerican settlers in ...
Giuseppe "Joe" Desimone, an immigrant from Naples, settled in Seattle's South Park neighborhood, where he made some money farming and more money investing in real estate. Like many immigrant farmers f...
The Donation Land Law of 1850, or Oregon Land Law, permitted settlers on unsurveyed lands to select claims of 320 acres per settler (640 acres per married couple) provided they resided there for four ...
Duwamish Gardens, a park in the south King County city of Tukwila, was previously a farmstead and truck farm on the Duwamish River. The land was settled and farmed by the Thomas Ray (1852-1940) family...
For nearly 30 years following Washington statehood, egg farming was a cottage industry comprised of small, family-owned operations tending to small flocks of chickens. That changed in 1915, when enter...
Wine grapes were one of the first cultivated fruits grown in the Pacific Northwest. Now wines made from Washington-grown grapes are among the best in the world. There are more than 750 wineries in Was...
This People's History reproduces a June 1, 1914 article from The Ranch, a south King County magazine, describing some of the emerging cooperatively-owned businesses in the Enumclaw area. At the time, ...
Richard G. "Dick" Farman co-founded the Farman Brothers Pickle Company in Enumclaw with his brother Fred. They started with a small 10-acre cucumber farm and pickling operation in 1944 and grew it int...
This reminiscence by Milan DeRuwe (1917-2006) describes his life growing up on a family farm near Colville, Washington, the hardships of the Great Depression, the process of losing the farm and going ...
Commercial farming in the Skagit Valley began in earnest in the 1880s after much of the Skagit River's floodplain was walled off behind dikes, converting a maze of marshes, streams, and open channels ...
There have been nearly 160 flour mills in the state of Washington. In 1870 there were 22,573 in the United States. Why were there so many mills, and where did they all go? Why should we be interested?...
Garry oaks, the only native oaks in Washington, grow west of the Cascades and along the Columbia River below The Dalles. Although acorns were a staple food for Native Americans in California and to a ...
Alex Golitzin (b. 1939) is a revered figure in Washington winemaking. Born in France, raised in California, and trained as an engineer, Golitzin was living in Snohomish and working at Scott Paper Comp...
Grand Coulee Dam, hailed as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" when it was completed in 1941, is as confounding to the human eye as an elephant might be to an ant. It girdles the Columbia River with 12 ...
Washington was known for producing premium grapes long before it became famous for its premium wines. The commercial grape industry dates to the early 1900s, when widespread irrigation in Eastern Wash...
Joseph Banyan Hall migrated to Spokane Falls in Washington Territory in 1884, working as a blacksmith and raising cattle and wheat. He later went into the hardware business in Spokane. Hall penn...
Granges were an important political force through much of rural America through the first half of the twentieth century and were responsible for a number of progressive agricultural and political refo...