Topic: Agriculture
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 Banyan Hall (1857-1947) 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. Hal...
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...
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...
Roscoe Sheller of Sunnyside gave this talk about Yakima and Ellensburg pioneer Ben Snipes (1835-1906) to an April 1958 meeting of the Spokane Westerners. The talk was published in the Fall 1959 issue ...
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...
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...
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...
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 W. Bush (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 ...
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 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...
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...
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 ...
In this People's History, Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) tells the story of a horse with a mind of his own. This very strong-minded horse lived with the Pfister family near Tiger in Pend Or...
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...
This reminiscence was written by Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011), who as a young woman worked as a teller at the Green Lake State Bank, located in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood. In it she remember...
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, ...
Lucinda Collins Fares was the first white woman to settle in the Snoqualmie Valley. She was the daughter of Luther and Diana (Borst) Collins, and as a 13 or 14 year old was a member of the Collins par...