The Three-Way Split: How Bitter Feuds Carved Eastern Washington
In January 1891, the state legislature dissolved Lincoln County into three new entities—Grant, Big Bend, and remaining Lincoln—to settle a decades-long battle over county seats that once involved armed men holding courthouse keys.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
OLYMPIA, Jan. 26. — The fight for the division of Lincoln county has resulted in an agreement by the Lincoln delegation that the county shall be divided into three new counties, Lincoln, Big Bend and Grant.
The county is to be divided by a north and south line, and the new western territory called Big Bend. The remainder is then to be divided by an east and west line and the northern half called Grant and the southern will remain Lincoln, with Sprague as the county seat.
This threefold division is the result of a bitter jealousy that has for years existed between Davenport and Sprague as to the county seat, beginning as long ago as 1884, when Representative Hutchinson and seventy armed men prevented the removal of the county seat from Davenport to Sprague, holding the keys to the courthouse for twenty-eight days.
Every election since has been influenced more or less by the bitter local feeling and on that account it was first proposed to cut off Big Bend county and leave both fighting towns in the old, and a bill to that effect was introduced. The present arrangement will leave Sprague county seat of Lincoln, Davenport of Grant, and Wilbur of Big Bend.
The effect of the division will be to increase Republican representation, inasmuch as Big Bend and Grant are strongly Republican and Lincoln Democratic. The old county nearly always returns one or more Democratic representatives. Representative Hutchinson's home is in the proposed Grant county, which is heavily Republican, while he is a Democrat.
This 1891 legislative maneuvering highlights how deeply local identity and political power were tied to geography in early Washington. The 'bitter jealousy' between towns like Davenport and Sprague mirrors modern disputes over municipal boundaries, annexation, and the distribution of tax revenue, showing that the fight for civic control is as old as the state itself.
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