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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1897 | 9 |
| 1898 | 12 |
21 stories matching spring
- Yakima's Orchards Weren't Dead After All
After a November cold snap that hit 20 below zero, Yakima Valley growers feared their fruit trees were ruined. By spring, the blossoms told a different story.
- The Dairy That Started With 20 Rented Cows and Ended Up With 2,560 Acres
Two Spokane entrepreneurs built Hazelwood Dairy on a promise that milk would be exactly as advertised—at a time when watered milk was the norm.
- The Desert That Could Bloom: Pasco’s Irrigation Revival
Philadelphia capital revives an abandoned Palouse canal project, promising water for 5,000 acres this summer and eventually 15,000 acres near Pasco.
- Stanwood Farmers Turned $300 and a Second-Hand Plant Into a Creamery of Their Own
A cooperative creamery at Stanwood reports a strong October, rising milk deliveries, and a plant now valued at $4,000—only two years after farmers pooled about $300 to buy used equipment.
- Turning Salt Flats into Wheat Fields
A Yakima sheepman discovers how to reclaim abandoned alkali-ridden soil through careful irrigation.
- The Palouse Wheat Harvest Disappointment
Farmers in the Palouse country face a double blow: lower-than-expected yields and a market price that refuses to budge.
- Fire Destroys Largest Creamery on the Pacific Coast
The Vancouver creamery, a $20,000 plant with a daily capacity of 150,000 pounds, was destroyed by fire on August 11. Owner George M. Weigle had recently revived the business.
- Don't Bond the Valley to a Dry Ditch
A Wenatchee editor warns that a $100,000 Wright-law irrigation bond would repeat the Kennewick failure—leaving settlers with debt, abandoned orchards, and no water.
- The Cattle Boom That Was Selling Off Its Own Future
A Northern Pacific land examiner warns that Nebraska buyers are sweeping up Washington breeding stock, prices are surging in Yakima County, and an Adams County artesian well could open a new grazing frontier.
- A $10,000 Co-op With No Fruit in the Store
A Seattle farm reporter walks into the Tacoma offices of the Washington Fruit Produce Union to find both its manager and secretary conveniently 'out of town,' an empty warehouse, a treasurer who ran off with the funds — and hundreds of farmers who had just paid $5 apiece to join.
- A Thousand Dogs for the Klondike
A Seattle syndicate imported stray dogs by the carload from Chicago, trained them to haul gold-rush supplies, and kenneled the pack in an abandoned brickyard.
- The Night the Chickens Sang Backup: Spokane’s Poultry Show
Spokane’s annual poultry exhibition drew hundreds of birds, a towering silver trophy, and an orchestra the chickens refused to let finish alone.
- They Called the Prairie Worthless. He Planted Wheat Anyway.
A government immigration inspector bought gravelly land south of Tacoma and proved the skeptics wrong — sixteen bushels an acre of No. 1 hard wheat.
- The Palouse Wheat Boom Was a Gold Mine—Until the Debt Came Due
An agricultural professor traces the Palouse’s speculative wheat economy: inflated land purchases, the rain-ruined crop of 1893, the panic that followed, and the sudden recovery by 1897.
- The Tumbleweed That Threatened Washington's Wheat
In 1898, a state agricultural professor traced an invasive Russian thistle to railway yards and warned that Yakima County was already infested.
- The Codlin Moth War: Hogs, Padded Poles, and a Walla Walla Grower's Doubts About Spraying
W. S. Offner reported a quarter-million-dollar fruit trade from the Walla Walla valley—and explained why the standard spray calendar failed against the orchard pest.
- The Wheat Was Ready. The Threshers Weren't.
After several lean years, farmers in the big wheat district around Spokane finally got the crop they had been praying for — and then two weeks of rain and snow arrived before the machines could get to it.
- The Yakima Chicken Fancier Who Saw Forty Cents in Every Lost Chick
Leonard Schott turned a North Yakima business sideline into an incubator-fed poultry ranch, sending broilers to Spokane and diagnosing his chicks with everything from rheumatism to appendicitis.
- The Creamery Valleys: A State Dairy Tour Finds Prosperity in Northeast Washington
Washington’s dairy commissioner rides the rails and a river steamer through the Kalispell and Colville valleys, where a new co-operative creamery, purebred Jerseys, and farmers’ butter are remaking the countryside.
- The 1898 Sales Pitch That Called the San Juan Islands a 'Klondike at Home'
A judge's promotional essay promised apples, prunes, sheep, fish, limestone and health in Washington's island county—and complained that the outside world had not yet noticed.
- The Orchardist Who Told the State Its Moth Spraying Was Useless
In 1898, a North Yakima grower argued that the state's codlin-moth spray schedule did not fit the Yakima Valley's climate—and warned that apple and pear growing might be doomed without better field science.