Clark County's Country Districts Will Vote the Saloon Up or Down
A local-option petition puts license-or-no-license on the November ballot outside the incorporated towns—where only Battle Ground has a saloon.
Vancouver.—The question of license or no license will be voted upon by all the country districts in Clark County outside of the incorporated towns on November 2. A petition with signatures was filed Saturday with the County Auditor by Donald McMaster, president of the Clark County Local Option League.
The district which will vote upon the local option question includes all Clark County save Vancouver, Camas, Washougal, Yacolt, La Center and Ridgefield. Vancouver is holding a separate election on the same question. In this district there is but one saloon, at Battle Ground.
“The question of license or no license will be voted upon by all the country districts in Clark County outside of the incorporated towns on November 2.”
Local-option fights were the era's granular temperance politics, letting rural districts opt out of liquor licenses town by town. Washington would go dry statewide in 1916, four years before national Prohibition; today's county-by-county fights over alcohol, zoning and ballot measures still turn on the same rural-urban split.
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