A tale of two Mattawas
A woman stands in front of the People's Bank was where Mattawa's residents kept their money in the late 1950s. The bank was on a bus and it came into the city once a week.
From 'houses of ill repute' to housing projects, complexion of town changed dramatically over its 50 year history
By Brandon Swanson
Herald staff writer
MATTAWA - Not too many cities get shaped by a coin flip. Mattawa may be the only city shaped by two.
The old-timers of Mattawa have seen their city boom and shrink and boom during its 50-year history. Two of Mattawa's longest residents took time to talk about the coin flips, the city's tales and where it is headed.
The Dams
When John Ball came to Mattawa as a teenager in 1959, he told his grandmother he would "never come back to this godforsaken country again."
The city, if one could call it that, was an empty field just five years earlier.
A town was plotted in 1908 but left for several decades, until the funding cleared for the dam at Priest Rapids on the Columbia River. Then in 1954, the company Schott, Freeman and Widmer of Warden bought the townships of Royal City and Mattawa, speculating sales due to the dam.
"The only reason Mattawa got started is because they were going to build the dams here," Ball said. "It was an investment."
It turned out to be a profitable one, settled on a coin flip.
"They could not afford to develop Mattawa and Royal City together," Ball said. "They flipped a coin - the Schotts got Mattawa, the Freemans got Royal City."
With the dam construction, the town swelled to house the workers.
"They brought these buildings down the river whole, on logs and barges," Ball said. "Two blocks (of town) were brought down."
The first building, on the corner of Road 24 and Williams Avenue, was a coldwater flat - a cabin with no electricity and no running water.
The workers flooded in to work on the dam. They were mostly white men in need of work - like Paul Parker.
When Parker came to Mattawa in August of 1957 to meet the parents of his wife, Bonnie, he told his her to get her things because they would not be staying long. Parker has been a resident for 47 years.
The pay was good and the city boomed so quickly that the people didn't have time to vote for a mayor. Again, Mattawa left it to chance. A coin flip between trailer court owner I.C. Cooper and service station owner Wally Lee determined the city's first mayor.
Parker said he can't remember if it landed heads or tails, but Lee won.
"It was most fun through the construction years," Parker said, because the city was filled with men he describes as "hard-working, hard-drinking, fun to be around."
Early Mattawa had a wild reputation.
"Eighty-five percent of our population was foreigners," Ball said. "But they were from England because English engineers built the damns. It was an exciting town when they were here. They had houses of ill repute, they had everything."
But when Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams were finished, it seemed so was Mattawa.
"A guy'd get laid off Friday night and by Sunday he'd hooked up his trailer and he was off to another job," Parker said, adding that sometimes he would go to work and come home and see his neighbors had hitched up their trailers and moved on.
Ball was one of those that moved on.
"My father worked on it from '59 to '63 and then we left," he said. "The jobs were done."
The farming
After the party comes the hangover.
The prospect of irrigation in the early 1960s kept some of the workers in Mattawa like Parker, who worked at as a surveyor then at a service station in town. But he watched nearly everyone else move away.
Ball, now a teacher, returned in 1981 and the population had fallen to a fraction of what it was 20 years earlier.
"When I left there were 3,000 Englishmen here," he said. "When I came back there were 156 people (total)."
Parker said farming might have saved Mattawa.
"If it hadn't been for irrigation, the town would have dwindled down to maybe nothing," he said.
Irrigation in Mattawa kicked off in 1972 and after a couple decades turned Mattawa to a farming community. Farming caused the population to boom again, and again it was with migrant people.
"It was very fast. We grew faster than we could handle it," Ball said. "Farming with migrant workers - that's all you can contribute it to."
The future
"When (Wahluke) High School was opened in 1986, there were 244 people and there was one Spanish-speaking student," said Ball, now the school's art teacher.
Nearly 20 years later, the population has increased more than tenfold, according to the U.S. census.
The complexion of the town also has changed - Mattawa is nearly 90 percent Hispanic.
With the migrant workers came tax-free housing projects.
"We've got housing projects all over this town and it's breaking us," Ball said.
Parker, who has been the fire commissioner for more than 35 years, agrees, adding the projects strain the ambulance and fire services and the city's water.
Mattawa's high unemployment and average age under 23 years has brought other worries.
"What bothers me are the bad apples that come here - the drug runners, the dopers, the ones that come up to work the program," Parker said.
"Mattawa has hit the national news more than any town I've lived in in my life," Ball said. "You name it, we have done it all."
Ball, who said he has seen Mattawa grow and die and grow again, wonders what is on the horizon.
"We're having a lot of farming problems now," he said. "Potatoes are down, onions are down, apples are down. We're going into grapes - well you run an apple orchard with 500 people and a grape vineyard with 25, what's going to happen?"
If Mattawa's history is any indicator, it may come down to a coin flip.