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The Vernita Ferry approaches the north bank of the Columbia River in this 1959 photograph from the State Archives.
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A nice snowball fight at Christmas could be a welcome break after a year in the desert.
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To reach the Glenwood Market you sometimes had to park in the roadway and scramble over a mountain of snow.
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The Danielson house in Glenwood stood south of town. It burned down several years ago.
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The old school at Glenwood provided years of education before it was replaced by the more modern facilities local children attend.
The reasons for my father’s decision to abandon the Danielson Ranch on Crab Creek have never been entirely clear to me. I remember that when I asked him about it, he was very close lipped. Myself, I was ready to get away from the Central Washington weather by the time I went to college. No more of these sweltering iron-colored skies for months on end, Enough of these months of boringly gorgeous sunsets and clear nights so starry you could hike the hills without a flashlight even when there was no moon. My father lived in Glenwood long enough to marry and have children, but he moved back to Othello to take advantage of irrigation water from the Columbia Basin Project in the early 1950s.
I’m sure I’ll revisit the reasoning behind my father’s choice another time. But it’s the holiday season, and for me that always brings to mind my grandparents and their old home in the Glenwood valley of Klickitat County. These were the only grandparents I knew, since my father’s folks had both passed on by the time I could crawl. My mother’s parents seemed incredibly ancient from the very beginning, as if they were the living remnants of the rich family history they represented. And if I have any explanation for this urge to write down these stories, it probably ought to be blamed on my Grandfather Herman, who labored over his antique typewriter, one-eyed, pecking out the letters one by one and filling up pages of uneven type that eventually became several volumes of local and family history about life in Klickitat County. Recognizing his skills as a story teller and nurturing my own taste for history, I made it a point to find time to ask him questions whenever we visited, and I was richly rewarded with personal stories and the outlines of a family’s fortunes on the Washington frontier. I’ll be passing some of this on in later articles. I regret that I didn’t inherit more than a few of his marvelous old photographs, so I won’t be able to post clear copies of them to illustrate his tales. Most of the photographs I am publishing came from my father’s collection and were probably his own.
My favorite Christmases as a boy were those we had at Glenwood. Our home place outside Othello might get heavy frosts and the occasional dusting of snow, but Glenwood seemed like it always had a white Christmas. Continue reading →
Posted in Cars, Columbia Basin, Family History, Glenwood, History, Irrigation, Native Americans, Saddle Mountain, Washington
Tagged Bickelton, Central Washington, Christmas, Cold War, Columbia Basin Project, Columbia River, Crab Creek, Desert, Eastern Washington, Family, Ford, Glenwood, Goldendale, Hanford Reservation, Highway 24, Highway 241, Highway 26, History, Irrigation, Klickitat County, McGee Ranch, Native Americans, Nature, Othello, Rattlesnake Ridge, Saddle Mountain, Satus Pass, Silver Dollar Cafe, Sunnyside, Vernita ferry, Washington, Yakima, Yamhill County Company