Our 86-acre property sits at 2,000 feet elevation and borders the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.
Native Americans have lived along the Columbia River and in the surrounding hills and plains for millenia. The Lewis and Clark Expedition encountered Klickitat peoples in the area in 1805, and over the following decades the United States government forced Native American peoples off the land. By the early 1900s, what is now our property was the site of the White Salmon Fruit Company’s apple orchard; locals called it the Fruit Ranch. Much of the following historical information comes from our late neighbor Hank, an avid local historian whose memory we celebrate every fall at “Hanksgiving.”
According to Lemuel and Lula Yarnell, who managed the Fruit Ranch starting in 1913 and ultimately purchased the property in 1921, “The apple rows were twenty four feet apart, so we decided to grow hay in between the rows. It was so heavy that we had to use one of the bigger [horse] teams to pull the mowing machine, as the smaller teams just couldn’t pull it fast enough to make it cut right. That ground really grew some beautiful hay.”
“A house isn’t a home until it has some flowers and a yard.”
They planted other flora too. “A house isn’t a home until it has some flowers and a yard,” Lula told her daughters years later, “so while Lem was off working, I started planting bulbs that the neighbors had given us. Back then everybody had daffodils, narcissus, and iris. I planted the iris along the fences, put a row of narcissus down both sides of the path to the spring, and planted daffodils wherever I could find a place for them. We had a few little lilac starts so I planted them in the front yard.” To this day, spring up here is an explosion of white, yellow, pink, and purple blossoms.
Things were going well: “When the apple boom first started in 1913, apples were bringing $2.50 a box. Apples were scarce then and the price was good. The orchards made a lot of jobs for fellows who were having a hard time of making it any other way. Most of that work paid $2.00 to $2.50 a day for a ten hour day. All they knew them days were ten-hour days.” But it didn’t last.
“We did alright for a while, then the bottom dropped out and the price of apples went way down, but the freight rates stayed the same. The folks who got in on the early market did alright, but they got to growing too many apples, and well, I guess they just got too many for the market.” Most of the orchards were ripped out, though our remaining Gravenstein apple trees produce tart, juicy, crisp, flavor-packed fruit that we eat, preserve, and turn into cider every fall.
Later, other families called the property home, but it was neglected for years leading up to our purchase in 2016. We’ve been carefully rehabilitating the land, following conscientious agricultural and management principles as much as possible, and we’ve been certified by multiple organizations whose missions we support. We planted the first grape vines in 2018 in friable ashy soil that radiates the intense late-summer sun and spins itself into dust devils in the near-constant wind — the vineyard now has ten varieties across ten acres.
