The State's Cow Bill
World War I veterans receive state aid to build a dairy industry on the newly settled tracts.
Project manager J.C. Scott and soldier settlers Shaun Kelly, Wilbur Morford, J.W. Coffman, and John Zwight were in Yakima earlier this week buying dairy cows. Twelve purebred Holstein cows were purchased at a dispersal sale. These are the first dairy cows purchased by settlers under the state legislature's 'cow bill,' which appropriated $25,000 for loans to settlers on state land settlement tracts for the purchase of dairy stock.
“This law appropriated the sum of $25,000 to be loaned the settlers on the state land settlement tracts in the purchase of dairy stock.”
This reflects the state's post-WWI effort to reintegrate veterans through land settlement programs, a major social undertaking in the early 20th century. Such programs were often fraught with financial difficulty for the settlers, prefiguring the later struggles of the White Bluffs colony before the Hanford project changed the landscape entirely.
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