It's fair and rodeo time again

Columbia Basin Herald, May 4, 1976

When Pam Tillis was a featured entertainer at the Grant County Fair in 2013, a 1977 poster with her father, Mel, was the headliner was located in the history barn. I asked her to sign it. Stop by the history barn to see her message.

by Herald Columnist & DENNIS. L. CLAY
| August 12, 2016 1:45 PM

Grant County history

Great fun will be available at the Moses Lake Roundup Rodeo and the Grant County Fair next week. Have a great time, but be careful out there.

Aftermath of Civil War directs family to move west

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.

These are memories of Grant County, compiled from taped interviews by the Grant County Historical Society.

Today we backtrack a bit and then continue Nat Washington’s story about Grand Coulee. He is presenting the background about his family back east before they moved west. Read on.

It was fine to remain in genteel poverty in the Shenandoah Valley with the Southern people, but it just wasn’t right to go out and do what my dad did after the Civil War.

He went to the University of West Virginia and worked in the mills and worked in the mines in order to get his education. And when he came back, strangely enough, it was one of those things that he just wasn’t quite accepted.

He started to practice law in his hometown and it just didn’t work. Some people felt that he had done the wrong thing. It wasn’t really honorable for gentlemen of the Shenandoah Valley to work in mines or the steel mills. So he in disgust left the area, came West and settled in the little town of Almira and started practicing law in Almira which is, of course, about thirty miles from the river. He became familiar with the unsurveyed public domain land.

Now about that time the apples were starting to move in the Wenatchee area. It was about that same time that the Bergs and the various people who really started making apples a big thing in Virginia also started to move apples in the Winchester and the Shenandoah Valley.

My dad knew about this unsurveyed public domain. Strangely enough, there were two black families who had come in and had squatted on that land. I’m not sure but I think somebody had been there before them because the log cabins, there were two log cabins on the place too old to have just been built in 1907, when this family was supposed to have come in.

So apparently somebody else had been on that land before and we don’t know who it was. But when my dad came in, those two black families, the Prices and the Brockmans were living on this unsurveyed public land. They were squatters, but under the law you could take up a land claim, even though it hadn’t been surveyed.

Then when it was surveyed then the time you had put in as a squatter also went towards the three years that you had to be on the land in order to prove up on a homestead. So the two black families had been there almost two years.

So then my dad got my grandfather and my grandmother, who wanted to make a change, and they moved out and moved to Spokane. In 1909 they went down and they were able to buy the squatters rights of the two black families. Of course, they inherited the two log cabins and the blacks took their livestock and moved out and my family moved in.