The River That Wasn't: A Captain’s Quest to Put Kennewick on the Map
Captain Martin L. Volwiler isn’t just shipping strawberries; he’s filming them from a boat deck to prove that the Columbia River is worth knowing about.
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.
The Columbia River Navigation Association, meeting in Astoria, has unanimously supported placing the north jetty work on a continuous contract basis and urged Congress to appropriate $1,500,000 for a giant dredger to deepen the bar channel to forty feet. Kennewick was represented at the convention by Geo. F. Richardson, M. H. Church, S. Z. Henderson, J. J. Rudkin, and Wm. Helm.
Meanwhile, Captain Martin L. Volwiler is engaged in a unique campaign for regional awareness. Speaking at the Commercial Club meeting Tuesday evening, Volwiler outlined his plan to produce a film showing how the Kennewick strawberry is produced from the time the plant begins to sprout in early spring until the berries are harvested. He intends to transplant some of the Kennewick plants in boxes on the deck of the Umatilla and record each day’s growth with his camera.
"I took up this work for the purpose of helping to put the Columbia river on the map," said the captain. "There are a lot of people in this community who do not even know where the Columbia river is. For instance, I received a letter the other day from a friend in New Hampshire who wrote that he saw one of my pictures at a show the evening before, and that the fellow who had sat next to him had said, 'This is the fourth time I have seen something about navigation on the Columbia river, in a moving picture show. Where the devil is this Columbia river, anyway? I am going home and get a map and look it up.'"
"This is exactly what I wish to accomplish—to cause a whole lot of people to get their maps and find out where and what the Columbia river is."
In an era before interstate highways and GPS, regional identity was fragile; Kennewick’s agricultural success depended entirely on convincing distant markets that the 'Columbia River' was a viable commercial artery, not just a geographic abstraction. Today, as rural communities struggle with broadband access and market connectivity, Volwiler’s use of early film technology to bridge the distance between producer and consumer feels remarkably prescient.
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