The Desert to Blossom: Yakima Makes Its Pitch for the Agricultural College
A local argument frames the arid climate of the Yakima Valley not as a weakness, but as the perfect scientific laboratory for the new state’s experimental college.
The agricultural college commission has visited Yakima and looked the place over with a view to locating the institution. It has gone on its way to look over sites offered by other counties, and will be engaged in its duty of traveling and listening to arguments for a week or ten days. Yakima County possesses the required conditions of soil and climate, is in close business connection with the Sound, and is the pioneer in irrigation experiments. There is no such school anywhere in the arid irrigating belt; such a college located in Yakima would benefit not only that County, but all similar districts in our own and in sister States. It would teach the methods by which millions of acres of the most productive land on this continent could be made the support of hundreds of thousands of farmers.
“It would do more than any other one thing to build up, and that rapidly, the population of our State, and increase her wealth.”
This reflects the early boosterism of Yakima, where the promise of 'making the desert blossom' through irrigation defined the local economy for a century. Today, the tension between agricultural water rights and conservation efforts remains one of the region's most pressing civic debates.
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