The Hop Gold Rush of the Puyallup Valley
In 1877, a booming agricultural industry turned the Puyallup Valley into a high-stakes arena of heavy capital, immigrant labor, and unpredictable environmental risks.
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Whoever has compared the different river valleys around the Sound cannot fail to notice the local differences of soil, production, and social institutions. The hop interest is emphatically the leading agricultural interest of the Puyallup, being to that section what grain is to the Skagit or logging to the Snohomish. Mr. J.R. Meeker, father of Ed Meeker, was the first to try the experiment in 1864. In 1865, L.F. Thompson imported twenty-five hundred hop roots from San Francisco for one hundred dollars, which eventually superseded all other varieties. Today, the Puyallup hop industry is a massive financial operation. To start a ten-acre hop yard requires roughly $4,575 in capital for land, poles, dry houses, and equipment before a single profit is realized. Because prices fluctuate wildly—ranging from 10 to 55 cents per pound—farmers often find themselves on the edge of ruin. The harvest itself is a chaotic, multi-ethnic effort. Around 2,500 pickers descend on the valley, including Chinese laborers arriving by canoe from Tacoma and Klickitat Indians traveling over Naches Pass with their ponies. While the valley is generally temperate, the influx of transient labor and the presence of disreputable characters from Seattle selling liquor at horse races threaten to turn the peace into a pandemonium.
“The price of hops varies so from year to year, that many who one year fancy themselves independent, the next year are plunged almost hopelessly in debt.”
The 1877 struggle for agricultural dominance in the Puyallup mirrors today's tension between high-overhead, capital-intensive farming and the precarious labor force required to sustain it. Much like the 19th-century hop growers who lived in fear of market crashes, modern Washington farmers grapple with global commodity pricing and the complex dynamics of a diverse, seasonal workforce.
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