The Potato Famine That Never Left the Sound
A century and a half ago, Seattle farmers lamented the mysterious collapse of the Puget Sound potato trade, marking the end of a boom that once promised regional prosperity.
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.
One of the unaccountable things in nature is the rapid deterioration that has been noticeable in the potato product of the western section of this Territory within the past ten years. At the time of the drought and consequent potato famine in California in the years 1864-65, moderate fortunes were realized in a single season by individual potato growers on the Sound. The tuber then commanded five dollars per bushel in San Francisco, and the warm, rich alluvions of our river valleys were found wonderfully adapted to their growth, yielding four, five and six hundred bushels to the acre. At that time, Puget Sound potatoes bore a gilt-edged reputation, but after years have unfortunately changed all that. Late planting, with late Spring floods and early Fall frosts, inferior selection of seed and the exhaustion of the soil by continuous cropping, have produced their normal effects, and yield, quality, price and reputation have all gone down together. Three or four years ago the crop was smitten with the blight—doubtless the identical potato-rot or mildew which caused the famine in Ireland—and the disease has been steadily filling the Puget Sound country. In consequence, many farmers are looking about for substitutes, such as hops or orchards.
“The difficulty being rather to check their overgrowth than the reverse.”
Just as the 1876 farmers struggled with the collapse of the potato industry due to blight and soil exhaustion, modern Washington agriculture faces similar existential threats from changing climates and volatile global markets. The history of the Sound is a history of cycles—from the initial 'gilt-edged' booms that brought early settlers to the inevitable busts that forced them to adapt or face ruin.
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