Boardman: Water Turned the Desert Green

Boardman sits on what was pure sagebrush desert until a civil engineer named Samuel Boardman filed a homestead claim here in nineteen oh three, betting that irrigation would make it farmable. He was right, but the water took years to arrive. In nineteen sixteen a twenty-mile canal from the Umatilla River, built under the federal Reclamation Act of nineteen oh two, finally reached the townsite.

The town was platted around the same time, and in nineteen twenty-one it was officially incorporated and named after Samuel Boardman, who went on to become Oregon's first full-time state parks superintendent, the man who protected much of the Oregon coast and Gorge for public use. Today Boardman is a small agricultural city on the Columbia, its fields fed by the same irrigation project Boardman himself envisioned.