Ritzville: Once the World's Wheat Capital

Philip Ritz homesteaded here in eighteen seventy-eight, planting wheat on eight thousand acres of Washington plateau. When the Northern Pacific Railroad platted a town around his claim two years later, they named it after him. By eighteen eighty-three, Ritzville was the only town in Adams County, so it became the county seat by default.

Then came the wheat boom. In nineteen oh one, Ritzville shipped more wheat than any other town in the world: two million bushels filling nearly two thousand boxcars in a single year. German-Russian immigrants arrived through the eighteen nineties, bringing old-country farming customs and their own dialect. The compact downtown they built between eighteen eighty-nine and nineteen twenty is now a National Register Historic District, its grain elevators and rail depot still standing as monuments to a moment when this patch of high desert was briefly the most productive wheat-shipping point on earth.