Nat Washington's history continues

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.

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

Today we continue Nat Washington’s story about Grand Coulee. He is presenting the picture of what his grandparents encountered after they moved to eastern Washington. Read on.

My grandmother always dressed as neat as a. pin every day of her life and if my grandad really wasn’t going out sawing wood or doing something like that he still wore a tie most every day when he was down there.

They used the old log cabin, after the other family moved out, and then there were lots of pack rats in the cabin so they preferred to sleep in the tent. The cabin was built largely by my dad and my grandfather. They got their lumber up the river. I believe there was a little mill at Peach and my dad put the lumber together in a raft.

Of course he was practicing law, but he also was doing this too. He rafted the lumber down the river from Peach, beached it on the Vic sandbar, which gave the ranch its name called the Big Bar ranch.

Then he took the lumber up and made the little two-room cabin which then if you look at the picture you’ll find towards the hill you can see the corner of the old log cabin. So for awhile the two cabins faced each other. The one that they built backed the old log cabin.

Then the other picture shows the fireplace on the outside that my grandfather built. He had never built a fireplace before in his life and it didn’t draw as well as some fireplaces, but it was quite a colorful old fireplace in the area. Probably the first and only fireplace for miles around.

Then on the other side of this picture that I’m passing around again shows my grandad with a horse in front of the tent. This shows him on a horse in front of the old pole corral that they had put up. A good part of the corral was inherited when they got the place.

This also shows some of the horses and shows the rough country and the next picture shows the second old log cabin. It was down the river about a mile where the people by the name Price lived.

My dad homesteaded that area. Now each of the members of the family took out a homestead. Finally in 1911 they were able to get the land office to come in and survey it. But each person who homesteaded had to have his own homestead cabin. It didn’t say you had to build it, so they were able to use these old cabins that were already there.

More from Nat Washington next week.