Yakima: The City That Moved

The city you are driving through has one of the stranger origin stories in the Pacific Northwest: it was physically moved, building by building, four miles north to accommodate a railroad that refused to stop here.

In eighteen eighty-four, the Northern Pacific Railway reached the valley and established a construction depot at a settlement called Yakima City, near present-day Union Gap. But railroad officials decided Yakima City's site was unsuitable for a proper town and laid out a new settlement four miles to the north, called North Yakima. They then made the settlers an offer: the railroad would pay the cost of moving any building that wanted to come along. Through the winter and spring of eighteen eighty-four to eighteen eighty-five, more than one hundred structures were loaded onto rollers and trucked north across the valley floor. People who refused to move found their mail redirected to the new town anyway. On January first, nineteen eighteen, the North was officially dropped and the city became simply Yakima.

The valley's other defining story is water. The Yakima River drains the eastern slope of the Cascades, and the volcanic-ash soil it deposits, combined with warm days and cool nights, turns out to be nearly ideal for fruit. Catholic missionaries planted apple orchards here by the eighteen seventies. When irrigation canals arrived in the eighteen eighties and nineties, followed by the Northern Pacific's refrigerated rail cars, the valley exploded into one of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the country.

Today the Yakima Valley produces roughly seventy-seven percent of all hops grown in the United States, making it the second-largest hop-growing region in the world after Germany's Hallertau. Washington state as a whole produces about sixty percent of America's apples, and most of them come from here. The Yakama Nation, whose fourteen confederated bands gave the valley its name, hold a reservation immediately south of the city, on land that is a fraction of their original territory.