Genesee, Idaho: Palouse Wheat Town

Genesee sits in the rolling wheat country of the Palouse, about fourteen miles south of Moscow. Settlers from New York named it for the Genesee Valley back home in the eighteen seventies, drawn by soil that grew winter wheat as well as anything on the continent. The original settlement stood a short distance from where you find the town today.

When the Northern Pacific Railroad extended its Palouse branch line to Genesee in the late eighteen eighties, the settlement shifted to meet the tracks. Soon Genesee had stores, hotels, and grain warehouses. The railroad turned a farming village into a grain-trading center almost overnight.

It is still a farming town, and the Palouse around it still grows wheat in long golden swells that reach to every horizon.