The Agricultural Transformation of the Skagit Flats
Decades of diking and draining have turned tide lands into some of the most productive agricultural soil in the world.
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 town of La Conner is built upon one of those rocky hillocks that rise like islands in a sea out of the flat level of these tide lands. Messrs. Samuel Calhoun and Michael Sullivan were the first permanent settlers in this vicinity. At the start, many mistakes were made and much money uselessly wasted from not understanding the best methods of diking, putting in dams, and floodgates. The greatest mistakes were made in making the dikes too light and too narrow, not clearing the creek bottoms properly, or failing to protect them from muskrats. An estimate of the work done shows that hundreds of acres are now diked and ready for cultivation. It is expected that about 2,000 acres more will be diked this year. The average yield of this land is sufficient to astonish one used to the most fertile Iowa prairies; wheat can yield up to 80 bushels per acre when the ground is properly prepared.
“The average yield of this land is sufficient to astonish one used to the most fertile Iowa prairies.”
The massive diking projects of the 19th century fundamentally altered the Skagit Valley's geography, creating the fertile farmland that defines the region's economy today. This story documents the 'pioneer' phase of landscape engineering that still creates complex environmental and land-use tensions in the Skagit delta.
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