Benton County's First Bank Failure of the Depression
A collapse in Prosser reveals the fragility of an agricultural economy reeling from repeated crop failures and frost.
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.
Following a meeting of the directors of the Citizens’ State Bank of Prosser last Friday, and upon the directors’ request, the state bank examiner closed the doors and took charge of the institution Saturday. The directors took this action for the protection of the depositors. The bank was capitalized for $50,000 and its deposits ranged between $300,000 and $400,000. Benton County is said to have had approximately $100,000 on deposit in the bank but the county was fully protected by a surety bond. The loss of the wheat crop in the Horse Heaven and Rattlesnake hills for the last two years for lack of sufficient moisture, the small returns received for the fruit crop last year and the almost total loss of the crop this year by frost, preventing the bank from liquidating its assets, are the chief causes attributed for the bank's failure. This is the first bank in Benton County to go under during the present period of depression and is the second one to fail in the history of the county.
“The loss of the wheat crop... for lack of sufficient moisture, the small returns received for the fruit crop last year and the almost total loss of the crop this year by frost... are the chief causes attributed for the bank's failure.”
This 1924 financial crisis mirrors the volatility of rural economies dependent on single-industry agriculture. Today, the Horse Heaven Hills remains a landscape defined by industrial-scale farming and the same precarious environmental factors—water access and climate—that doomed local creditors a century ago.
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