Happy Birthday Moses Lake

The Great Depression was still on. Hitler was making his moves in Europe, but World War II. hadn't started. Grand Coulee Dam was nearly completed but design work on the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project was in its infancy. No one knew when irrigation would arrive.

Nationally, the Big Band era in popular music was flourishing, with Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman its leading exponents. The golden age of sports was still on - Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx in baseball, Byron Nelson and Ralph Guldahl in golf, Bill Tilden and Helen Willis Moody in tennis, Jesse Owens and Cornelius Johnson in track, Joe Louis in boxing.

It was against this backdrop that the 300-odd residents of the town known as Neppel decided to incorporate. They went to the polls on Sept. 9, 1938 and approved the proposal, 71 votes to 41. By their vote they changed the name of the new municipality to Moses Lake and elected the following city officials: Eric D. Peterson, mayor; Fred Nolan, Carl K. Burress, John Hochstatter, Ralph Davis and W.E. Bunnell, councilmen and C.E. Laing, treasurer.

Little did the handful of residents in the new city know that in three years, their country would be at war and that the Army would build an air base at Moses Lake. They also didn't know that the war would delay construction of the Columbia Basin irrigation system.

They were concerned with more immediate things. They wanted to develop a domestic water system, to put in sewer service. Their streets were unpaved and there were no sidewalks.

They were some assets. When the plat of Neppel was laid out in 1912 by a development company it provided for Broadway Avenue, the main street, to be 100 feet wide. Third Avenue was designed for 80 feet and the other streets 60 feet. These wide streets, decided upon when the automobile was a novelty, were the basis for city development along modern planning standards.

U.S. 10, a major continental highway, had been built right through Moses Lake. Then there was the lake itself, waiting to be developed.

But mostly there was a handful of people with the spirit, the confidence and the vision of pioneers. Their story, and the storm of what was wrought by them and those who followed them, is told in these sections.

- Aug. 9 1963 edition of the Columbia Basin Herald