A piece of history

Glancing at the history of Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE - A glance at Harold Hochstatter's copy of the Grant County Atlas shows a scattering of names - Neppel, Nagel, Moses Lake - all where the city stands now.

Moses Lake celebrates its 70th anniversary on Monday, but its history starts more than 30 years before, in 1906, on Nelson Road. Hochstatter, who collects historical photographs of the area, points at a picture of the four buildings, including the Moses Lake post office.

"That's Moses Lake," he said. "The McDonalds built the hotel up there and the post office was in the hotel … Miss Jessie McDonald was the postmaster, we always referred to her as Miss Jessie."

A couple of inches away on Hochstatter's map sits Neppel. The town built by the Brunder family at the direction of F.H. Nagle. Hochstatter said the distance might seem small, but without cars it wasn't as easy to cross the distance.

"You couldn't get in your car and drive to the next town," he said. "Neppel seemed to have some promise because of the lake and water was so important."

According to Loren Harris' History of Grant County, Nagle came to the area after the Brunder family purchased the area around the lake, and he named the city.

"Nagle immediately announced that he was (the) representative of the Brunder millions and would immediately start building a city on Moses Lake that would soon be larger than Wenatchee," Harris stated.

While Harris stated Nagle named the town, Hochstatter said where the name came from is still up for speculation.

"Where the name Neppel came from is anyone's guess … It could have been the name of someone in the Brunder family," he said. "It could have been a corruption of F.H. Nagle."

The local papers at the time couldn't even agree on the name, calling it Nagel or Neppel and Moses Lake, he said.

"It shows how hard it is to get the details right," he said.

What is clear is that the Moses Lake post office on Nelson Road closed in 1934, a victim of the Great Depression, Hochstatter said. Since people didn't know who Neppel was, and the lake was already named Moses Lake, they decided it was time for a name change.

"So they voted to do it," Hochstatter said.

The rest is history.