Five Cents to a $10,000 Farm: A Yakima Booster's Story
J. S. Williams arrived in the Yakima Valley nearly broke. Seven years later, he told a reporter he wouldn't sell his Sunnyside-ditch farm for $10,000.
The story, cleaned up
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J. S. Williams of Zillah is a typical Yakima farmer who could not be induced to live anywhere else. "This country has dealt kindly by me," he said to the Republic Saturday, "and if I didn't stand up for it I would be an ingrate. I landed here seven years ago and had just 5 cents in my pocket when I started out to look for a job. I found one and then borrowed money to send east for my family. In a couple of years I rented a farm down the valley. The first year I sold $3,500 worth of its products. The next year was a bad one for me, and I didn't make more than $200 above my living; but the following year—that was year before last—I drew over $6,000 out of the game for my season's work. Then I bought a place under the Sunnyside ditch for $4,000. It produced over $3,000 worth of stuff last year, and with good luck I expect to realize double that sum from it the coming season. I wouldn't take $10,000 for my farm. I don't tell about this to boast, but merely to illustrate a favorite proposition of mine that the Yakima valley is as good a poor man's country as there is anywhere. I know men who have done better than I have."—Republic.
“I landed here seven years ago and had just 5 cents in my pocket when I started out to look for a job.”
The Yakima Valley still sells itself as an agricultural promised land, though access to land and water is now far more contested and costly. Williams's five-cent-to-$10,000 story is boosterism with a ledger attached — the kind of origin myth western towns used to draw settlers, and one that still echoes in modern growth and farmland debates.
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