The Realities of Homesteading in the Washington Territory
A pragmatic farmer pushes back against the romanticization of agricultural life, detailing the hard labor required to tame the land near Seattle in 1888.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
We started working our parallel fields, digging deep and putting down boards crossways to leave space for air. We worked under the barn floor, on the ground, in the dark, and we have no patience for anyone calling this 'play farming.' When we began sowing wheat, we found the disc harrow worked the soil too deep, so we went back to the old-fashioned brush drag. Old Jeff and Dick did not think there was any 'play farming' in dragging that brush over the field. Our onion harvest was also back-breaking; we followed advice to place them in layers for ventilation—piles of work, no 'play farming' there. Next year, we hope to fill two more silos beside the two we already have. We are all working 'up there' for the dollar to pay the bills. With hay at $30 per ton and other products, we are all pushed to better methods, deeper plowing, closer weeding, and stricter practices.
“We are all working 'up there' for the dollar to pay the bills. ... all to spur us up to better methods, better farming, deeper plowing, closer weeding, stricter methods.”
This 1888 account reveals the grit behind the early development of the region, echoing the modern tensions between the romantic, high-stakes real estate market of Seattle and the grueling, unglamorous realities of land cultivation and infrastructure maintenance that made the city viable in the first place.
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