The Desert Beckons: The Fight to Irrigate Benton County
Highland Improvement and Commercial Clubs launch an ambitious campaign to finally secure irrigation rights for the long-promised Benton Unit.
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 Highlands Improvement club and the Kennewick Commercial club expect to exhaust every possible effort to secure the irrigation of a large body of land in this county originally included in the Benton Unit of the Yakima Reclamation project. The construction of this unit has been a dream and a hope of this community for years, but until now, there has never been any concerted effort made to hasten its building. Both organizations, however, are now fired with a determination to conduct an active campaign until something is started. Tuesday evening, a large delegation of Highlanders met with the Commercial club and the task of rounding up preliminary data was left to a committee composed of L. L. Rudkin, M. M. Moulton, and J. W. Vickers. These gentlemen were requested to get into immediate communication with the U. S. reclamation service and the land department of the Northern Pacific railroad.
“The construction of this unit has been a dream and a hope of this community for years.”
The quest for water rights and infrastructure funding in the drylands of Benton County remains a central pillar of the region's political and economic identity. Today’s battles over the Columbia Basin Project echoes this 1916 effort to organize and lobby federal agencies for land transformation.
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