A Valley Selling Itself: Vineland’s Orchard Boom
Strawberries at $400 an acre and cottages starting at $300: an Asotin County correspondent reports a settlement growing faster than its houses can be built.
A Vineland (Asotin County) correspondent writes that strawberries there last summer paid growers over $400 per acre, and they failed to meet the demand from Lewiston and the hill towns. Melons were easier to grow—as easy as potatoes—and paid $125 net and more per acre. The yield is wonderful. Onions and all other high-class vegetables pay handsomely. Next season the direct railroad connections with Spokane and other markets will greatly increase the demand.
Vineland (of which the post office is Concord, Wash.) is enjoying a wonderful yet fully deserved prosperity. Dozens and scores of new houses, on the two- to five-acre tracts, are constantly in course of erection, and they are mostly very neat and pretty cottages, costing all the way from $300 to $3,000. Yet the worst winter weather in that sheltered valley is so mild that many of the new settlers live comfortably in tents and light shacks while they are building their houses. A large proportion of the Vinelanders are ranchers, wheat growers and cattlemen from the highlands of the surrounding country, who seek the valley for homes and the good schools there in the warm and pleasant valley in the midst of profitable orchards and gardens, while keeping and working their hill ranches. The handsome brick, stone and wood school house, just completed at a cost of $4,500, has three large rooms, with about 150 pupils now in attendance.
“Dozens and scores of new houses, on the two- to five-acre tracts, are constantly in course of erection, and they are mostly very neat and pretty cottages, costing all the way from $300 to $3,000.”
Vineland’s boosterish portrait of cheap cottages, new settlers and profitable orchards reads like an early version of the rural-growth pitch still familiar around Clarkston and the Asotin County lowlands. The detail that newcomers lived in tents while building houses is a reminder that housing supply has often lagged behind the promise of cheap land and rail access. More than a century later, the tension between agricultural preservation and residential growth remains a live local question.
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