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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1902 | 6 |
| 1903 | 26 |
| 1904 | 13 |
45 stories matching year
- Five Cents to a $10,000 Farm: A Yakima Booster's Story
J. S. Williams arrived in the Yakima Valley nearly broke. Seven years later, he told a reporter he wouldn't sell his Sunnyside-ditch farm for $10,000.
- Sunnyside’s Eight-Ton Alfalfa Boast, Put to the Test
A North Yakima skeptic doubted the valley’s famous hay yields. A local correspondent polled the oldest growers and came back with a table—and a defense of the district’s sales pitch.
- A Puyallup Hop Grower’s London Cable
Louis Gunter locks in two years of his crop at 25 cents a pound—after sending samples to the London brewer who once employed him in Hamburg.
- How an old mining ditch and a boulder patch became a $6,000 orchard
A correspondent's tour of the Methow valley and the benches above Pateros finds peaches by the boxcar, seven-pound carrots, and a warning that California land had already outrun the poor man.
- The Creamery War Comes to the Yakima Valley
Seattle money builds a permanent milk plant at North Yakima, and the dairymen of Central Washington suddenly find themselves with buyers competing for every can of cream.
- The Fruit Broker Who Shipped Bananas to the Arctic—and Planned to Make His Employees Co-Owners
J. B. Powles buys out Seattle's oldest commission house, revealing a rags-to-fortune run built on produce, Alaska trade and an unusual plan to share ownership with his workers.
- Seattle's Milk Supply Caught in a Secret Trust
A quiet combination of milk dealers and a new condensed milk company threatens to control prices, squeeze out independents, and lock Skagit farmers into low-paying contracts.
- The Governor Kills the Puyallup Experiment Station — and Its Director Leaves for St. Louis
A budget veto strands four years of horticultural research as Prof. D. A. Brodie departs for the world’s fair.
- One Can of Prunes, Five Carloads of Orders
A journalist-turned-farmer with ten acres of unsellable strawberries builds a canning business in Olympia — and discovers that a pretty label sells middle America on Puget Sound fruit.
- The Battle for the Range
Federal scientists head to Eastern Washington to investigate the environmental toll of overgrazing by sheep.
- Washington Dairymen Declare War on a Seattle Butter Dealer
At a dairy convention, producers accuse a Seattle dealer of cold-storing eastern butter and mislabeling it to break the market—and call for an organized, public fight.
- The Farmer Who Said the Colleges Were Failing Rural Washington
Addressing the state dairymen, farmer Wm. F. Izett argues that the land-grant colleges move too slowly and cost too much to save the farm — and pitches a cheaper, faster kind of agricultural school as the 'machine gun' the countryside needs.
- The Sunnyside Canal's New Problem Was Too Much Water
Farmers who once feared the canal could never water the whole valley are now drowning in seepage — so a private company has been chartered to drain the land before the state district can get its paperwork done.
- Two Farmers Who Started With Nothing and Built Dairy Fortunes
A Scandinavian immigrant with no money and an Ilwaco homesteader who once lacked even winter underclothing became models of dairy success through testing, breeding, and relentless work.
- 'Only Another Name for a Sort of Annual Picnic': Washington's Road-Tax Fight
A good-roads convention hears that farmers resent paying their road tax in cash instead of working it out, that the money vanishes into 'graft or rake-off,' and that Spokane County's section-line roads were laid out so badly they must be rebuilt from scratch.
- The Milk That Made Kent Grow
Kent's condenseries turn White River Valley milk into Carnation and baby food, and a struggling village becomes a dairy boomtown.
- A Canal Turns Sagebrush Into a Boomtown
Kennewick bets on 15,000 irrigated acres and a thousand new residents as the Horse Heaven country fills with wheat.
- The Sugar Beet Gamble in Yakima
Despite a gubernatorial veto of the state bounty bill, a persistent promoter is pushing forward with plans to establish a sugar beet industry in Yakima.
- Farmers Take On the Commission Men—and Demand Weekly Checks
Yakima growers propose a $5,000 bond for produce brokers, while Sumner farmer W. H. Paulhamus recalls how organized producers stopped getting 'did' by middlemen.
- Governor's Veto Shuts Down Puyallup Experiment Station
A $12,000 legislative appropriation for the branch agricultural station is vetoed, forcing the college to lease the land and sell the livestock.
- A 1.5-Million-Acre Taking: The Colville Reservation Was About to Be Thrown Open
Federal officials and land agents anticipated a rush of white homesteaders into the southern half of the Colville Indian Reservation, framing Indigenous land as 'closed' and state growth as its natural destiny.
- Samuel Hill Warns Seattle Would 'Die Like Rats in a Trap' Without Highways
As Congress weighs the Latimer and Brownlow road-funding bills, the Seattle utility magnate and son-in-law of James J. Hill makes the case that paved highways out of the city are a matter of survival, not comfort.
- State Funding for Washington's Farmers' Institutes
For the first time, the state legislature has appropriated $5,000 to support agricultural education across Washington's counties.
- Budget Cuts Silence Washington's Farmers' Institutes
A Pullman college president tells The Ranch that six or seven faculty posts were cut, leaving no one free to carry agricultural lectures into the countryside in 1903.
- Before Pike Place: Seattle's Push for a Public City Market
An 1904 farm-paper editorial argued that Seattle lagged behind smaller eastern cities by lacking a daily public market where rural producers could sell directly to consumers — a proposal that anticipated Pike Place Market by three years.