Ritzville: Wheat Capital of the Columbia Plateau

In the spring of eighteen seventy-eight, a settler named Philip Ritz led a small party into the dry Columbia Plateau of eastern Washington and started growing wheat. When the Northern Pacific Railroad drove its line through in eighteen eighty-one, the stop it created was named after him.

Ritzville grew fast. Adams County split from Whitman County in eighteen eighty-three, and Ritzville became the county seat because it was simply the only settlement of any size. The town pulled in Volga Germans from Russia who recognized the dry-land wheat conditions as something close to home. By the early nineteen hundreds Ritzville was one of the busiest wheat-shipping points in the Pacific Northwest. Today it sits astride Interstate Ninety at the crossroads of Adams County, a quiet hub still surrounded by the rolling wheat fields that put it on the map.