Topic: Agriculture
In Washington, a national leader in both farm production and international trade, agricultural exports played a key role in development from the early years of non-Indian settlement. As steamboats car...
Washington's soils and climate make it one of the most productive agricultural states in the union. When explorers and fur traders from the East Coast and Europe reached the Northwest in the late 1700...
At the turn of the twentieth century, Washington farmers and ranchers realized they still had much to learn about the land. Washington State College (later University) in Pullman became the center of ...
The U.S. government officially recognizes more than 200 wine-growing regions, known as American Viticultural Areas (AVAs). Fourteen of those AVAs are located partially or entirely within Washington st...
Associated Vintners (AV) was a Seattle winemaking firm formed primarily by a group of University of Washington faculty members. Its backstory is perhaps the classic local instance of home garage-based...
Joseph Koch (1920-2000) was a longtime resident of Auburn, a small town located in south King County only a few miles from the Pierce County border. From the time of his retirement in 1962, Joe was on...
Beef cattle have been an economic driver in Washington's agricultural history since the first cattle arrived by ship with Spanish explorers, likely in 1780. Production soared with the rush of gold min...
The following short essay was written in 1934 by Bellevue native Patricia Groves Sandbo (b. 1916), a freshman at Seattle Pacific College, for her English II Class. She received an "A" for her story th...
Benton City is a small municipality of some 3,000 residents on the north bank of the Yakima River near the center of Benton County in the Columbia Basin region of southeastern Washington. A hunting an...
Located where the Nisqually River empties into southern Puget Sound on the Pierce-Thurston county border, the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge protects the river's estuary, providing...
After the Puget Sound "Indian War" of 1855-1856, a number of high-status Coast Salish refugees relocated to Chimacum Prairie, south of Port Townsend at the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula. T...
The Boeing Employees' Winemakers Club (BEWC) originally took flight as a hobbyist organization in 1971 when a small group of Seattle-based aeronautics coworkers, who were also amateur wine enthusiasts...
Jeremiah Borst is considered to be the father of the Snoqualmie Valley, located in north central King County. A soft-spoken man with a lisp, he was the first permanent non-Indian settler in the valley...
Cameron Holt's paper won the HistoryLink.org Junior Paper award for her 2012 essay submitted in the Washington state History Day competition. Cameron was a student at Housel Middle School in Prosser, ...
Amos Brown was a prominent early citizen of Seattle. He was a pioneering lumberman in the Puget Sound region beginning in the 1850s and had substantial real estate holdings in present downtown Seattle...
George Bush (c. 1790?-1863) was a key leader of the first group of American citizens to settle north of the Columbia River in what is now Washington. Bush was a successful farmer in Missouri, but as a...
Chateau Ste. Michelle is a Woodinville-based winery that is Washington's largest fine-wine producer. The business was built upon the foundation of the state's most successful winemaking firm, Seattle'...
Camas (Camassia spp) bulbs were harvested and baked as a sweet, fructose-rich food by Native Americans throughout the Great Basin and the Pacific Northwest. Camas meadows or "prairies" were often burn...
Weaving with spun yarns was a defining characteristic of pre-Contact Coast Salish civilization in the Salish Sea (the marine waterways of what are now Washington and British Columbia), together with t...
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...
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...