DeYoung's Produce Shed and the Farming Valley
Near Woodinville, Washington
Long before wine, this valley floor fed the region. Once the land was logged off and the yearly flooding was finally tamed, especially after Lake Washington was lowered in nineteen sixteen, the rich Sammamish bottomland turned into prime farm country. Dairies spread across the valley, among them Jess Brown's Millview Dairy and Frederick Stimson's celebrated Hollywood Farm.
Truck gardens grew berries and vegetables in the dark soil. At the center of this trade stood the DeYoung family. Their DeYoung Produce Packing Shed gathered the valley's harvest, packed it, and shipped it out by railroad both to Seattle and to distant markets.
Over time that operation became the Lowell DeYoung Feed Mill, a fixture that kept serving local farmers for many years. The wider Puget Sound river valleys had also ridden an earlier boom in hops, the flavoring for beer, which surged in the eighteen eighties when a blight in Europe opened a hungry export market. Hops faded, but dairy and produce carried Woodinville for generations.
When you sip a wine here today, you are standing on ground that spent a century as one of the most productive small farm valleys in western Washington.
