Wheat becomes future of Colfax

COLFAX — Trains may have spurred growth in Whitman County and launched what today has become the city of Colfax.

But even in the 1880s, residents knew wheat was in their future.

The Palouse Gazette from October 1881 gave what local farmers and the media believed to be the history of wheat in the Americas.

“It is difficult in the present day to realize the fact that wheat was one time entirely unkown in America; and prior to the discovery of this country by Columbus there was no cereal in America approaching the wheat plant.

“It was not til 1530 that the wheat crop found its way into Mexico, and then only by chance. A slave of Cortes found a few grains of wheat in a parcel of rice and showed them to his master, who ordered them planted, the result showed that wheat would grow on Mexican soil, and to-day one of the largest wheat fields in the world is near the Mexican capital.”

According to the National Association of Wheat Growers from the Wheat Foods Council, “wheat originated in the ‘cradle of civilization’ in the Tigris and Euphrates river valley, near what is now Iraq.”

According to Washington’s Centennial Farms, “Whitman County is home to some of the most productive dryland wheat farms in the country and also to the greatest number off Washington’s Centennial Farms.

“Settlers arriving in the 1870s and 1880s quickly discovered the productivity of the Palouse, and its reputation as a major wheat-producing region was soon established.”

It also states that in 1989, wheat was harvested from 400,500 acres, and has been the nation’s top wheat producer every year since 1978, “with production topping 30 million bushels in 2014, a relatively low-yielding year.”

— Look for Part 4 in the July 7 edition of The Gazette.