The Pastor’s Sales Pitch for Kennewick
Rev. C. D. Rarey returns from an Indiana lecture tour, selling the Northwest as a land of opportunity to those weary of rain-soaked, failing harvests.
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.
Rev. C. D. Rarey, pastor of the M. E. church, returned home Saturday from a two weeks' visit to his old home in Indiana. While visiting his old friends, Mr. Rarey found time and opportunity to spread the gospel of the great possibilities of the Northwest country. In speaking of his trip, Mr. Rarey said: 'My friends arranged for meetings in Nappanee, Huntington, Fort Wayne, and Kokomo. It was not hard to get the people interested in Kennewick and the Northwest, because many of them said that four years ago, they considered my health so critical that they never expected to see me alive again. At these meetings I spoke on the benefits and inspirations that came to me in this great Northwest, with its majestic mountains and grand rivers. The N. P. I. Co., the Kennewick Commercial club and the Spokane Chamber of Commerce had supplied me with stereopticon slides to give them a splendid evening’s entertainment. Many expressed themselves as expecting to visit the Northwest, and have a stop-over at Kennewick. In Indiana, the climatic conditions form a great contrast. They have had such continuous rain, that not half of the wheat and oats had been thrashed, and the grain was beginning to sprout. Most of the corn fields were very weedy, and the farmers fear there will be much soft corn.'
“It was not hard to get the people interested in Kennewick and the Northwest, because many of them said that four years ago, they considered my health so critical that they never expected to see me alive again.”
This reflects the early 20th-century boosterism era where local clergy acted as informal real estate agents for the city. It highlights the stark contrast between Kennewick's irrigated desert, which promised stable agriculture, and the humid, unpredictable farming regions of the Midwest—a pitch that helped populate the Tri-Cities.
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