Don Urquhart assisted with railroad route planning

Grant County history

The Grant County Historical Society has compiled several volumes of Grant County history. The books are available for purchase at the Historical Society Museum gift shop in Ephrata.

I bought the series in 2009 and secured permission to relay some of the history through this column. Memories of Grant County, compiled from taped interviews by the Grant County Historical Society.

Today we backtrack to continue the story of Wilson Creek by Cris Mordhorst, recorded Feb. 10, 1976.

Way back when Wilson Creek was getting started, Zach Finney started the Wilson Creek School District and his land is right next to where we live.

When he started the Wilson Creek School District the first teacher taught right in his home and stayed there. Two of his children were old enough to go to school at that time and their names were Roy Finney, who later had a garage at Soap Lake for a long time, and Oscar Finney. Archie and Cora were two more but I talked to her on the telephone and she said they were too young to go to school while it was out on the ranch.

When Mr. Donald Urquhart heard that the Great Northern Railroad was planning to build a railroad to the coast, he wrote to them and offered to meet their engineers at Spokane and show them a feasible route to Wenatchee.

They wrote back and accepted his offer. He met them in Spokane and took them over the present route by horseback. All went well until they got to the hills this side of Trinidad.

There he was stuck and didn't know just how to get down close to the water level and the engineers thanked him and told him he was a lot of help, but they would make their way from there on. Later on he did help them through the Cascades.

Now I am speaking in Ephrata and I don't expect to get run out of here but I'd like to say this. In 1909 Grant County was formed, it being Douglas County when we came.

Grant County was once a part of Spokane County, then a part of Lincoln, then a part of Douglas County, then becoming Grant County. Before Grant County was formed Wilson Creek was the second largest town in Douglas County. It was only surpassed by Waterville, so it wanted to make a bid to become the county seat.

Wilson Creek sent an attorney to Olympia to make a bid for Wilson Creek to be the county seat, but Ephrata was a little wiser. They sent two attorneys and one of them spent the night drinking with the attorney from Wilson Creek, and also one from Quincy. So when the bids for Grant County seat were heard, one attorney from Ephrata made a bid for the county seat to be located at Ephrata, no other invitations being made, Ephrata was chosen to be the county seat in 1909.

Wilson Creek area history

The Rev. David H. Crawford compiled and published a history of families in and surrounding Wilson Creek titled, "Family Memories of Wilson Creek Area." The book was printed in 1978, which was the 75th anniversary of the town. David's son, John Crawford, has given permission for those memories to be a part of this column.

Today we continue the story of the MacCheyne Family:

Born near Aberdeen Scotland in 1871, John C. Jack MacCheyne, Jack firstcame to America as a cabin boy on a boat at the age of 14, then returned to Scotland and came back to New Youk State with his parents and family a short time later.

When he was 21, he left this large family of brothers and sisters in New York and "came west to make his fortune."

From California he sent home to his family a tintype picture of himself taken in a cowboy hat and a pair of sheepskin chaps.

He first worked in the fruit orchards near Meced, California where he met and married his first wife, Grace Fitchett. They later moved to Everett, Washington, first coming to Grant County around 1906 to homestead in the Frenchman Hills near Corfu in the lower Crab Creek area.

His family then consisted of Grace and their three girls, Margaret, Iva and Irene.

In 1918 Jack married Anna Woolman Hudson, a widow with one daughter, Georgia. Anna was also a resident of Wilson Creek from 1939, when she and Jack moved here, until her death in 1949. She had come to the state from Minnesota about 1908 because of her father's work (Horace M. Woolman) as a civil engineer involved with the building of the Milwaukee Railroad.

She attended normal school in Cheney and taught school briefly in the Smyrna area before marrying Sidney Hudson, a farmer who was also a school director, who died just a few years later.

After Jack and Anna were married, during the early 1920s: Jack served as Deputy Sheriff of Grant County and later as Game Warden. He worked for some time in the soda mine near Warden, also.

Their four children, Phyllis, Jean, Ruth and Robert, were born while they lived in Ephrata. The family moved to Stratford in 1932, where all four attended grade school.

A memory of that time was being ill with what was called smallbox. Most of the children in the Wilson Creek-Stratford area had it, and many have found through the years that smallpox vaccinations do not take because of the immunity at that time.

The family moved to a farm on the south hill during the big depression. Crops, however, were so poor as to be unharvestable, and times were hard for the parents, but the years were not remembered as unhappy by the children.

Jack drove them to Stratford to school where the older ones took the bus, then driven by Ernie Burke, to Wilson Creek to high school. All four eventually attended Wilson Creek high school.