The Desert Road District
Sunnyside boosters launch a pioneering bid to link the Inland Empire highway to the isolated Priest Rapids district.
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.
First steps toward the construction of seventy miles of permanent highway to connect the Inland Empire highway with the Priest Rapids district through a road leading from Sunnyside were taken recently. A petition asking for the creation of an independent road district, as provided for in the highway code of 1917, is to be filed with the Prosser court, it was decided at a conference held at Barrel Springs, about the center of the 460 sections to be included in the proposed district. Of the sections, 260 are in Benton County, 126 in Yakima, and 76 in Grant. Sunnyside good roads boosters have taken the lead in the matter and say that, so far as they have been able to discover, no independent road district has been created since the law providing for them was passed.
“Sunnyside good roads boosters have taken the lead in the matter and say that... no independent road district has been created since the law providing for them was passed.”
The Priest Rapids area, once a remote agricultural prospect, would later become synonymous with the Hanford Site and the massive infrastructure projects that followed. Today’s road network in the Tri-Cities region is the legacy of this early 20th-century boosterism that sought to tame the sagebrush with pavement.
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