Pomeroy Pioneer Portraits

Ten Years Ago

April 27, 2011

Combined consequences of the state budget deficit and lower long-term care resident census have started to affect operations at Garfield County Memorial Hospital. Immediate reductions in nursing home rates, part of state budget cuts, will have approximately $70,000 direct fiscal impact.

Residents of the long-term care unit and students from the LEEP Daycare Center were treated to a visit by a 1-month-old lamb, brought by Jim McKeirnan.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

May 1, 1996

Members of Pomeroy City Council are upset Mayor Don Stellwagen was quoted in the paper that he had spoken with some of them about his decision to fire public works director Rob Cameron when he had not. The mayor has the authority to fire at-will employees without consulting Council, but members thought consulting with the Council first would have been a “courtesy” and that the statement he made that a majority of the Council concurred was not right.

The state Department of Ecology will spend $2 million to “remediate” Garfield County’s nationally known “burning road” over the next two months.

Fifty Years Ago

April 29, 1971

The Garfield County Ambulance Association is in need of more volunteer drivers. The association is down to five drivers, and that places too much work on the drivers there are.

The body of a Yakima man, missing for more than three months since a boating accident in the Snake River at Clarkston, was found yesterday morning at Lower Granite Dam.

Appreciation for the outstanding talent of Pomeroy was shown when over 400 people attended the Spring Musical Variety Show in the high school auditorium.

Seventy-Five Years Ago

April 25, 1946

The greatest junior stock show in the history of Garfield County was held in Pomeroy when 4-H and F.F.A. members paraded a mammoth amount of top beef around the streets of Pomeroy while the judges were selecting the winners.

Leslie Riley has imported into the county the first registered Brahma bull. The animal is a yearling, true to his type and came from Texas.

R.R. Johnson & Son, lumber and mill men Oregon, have purchased the six-acre tract of land just across the railroad right-of-way north of the Blue Mountain Cannery plant and plan to erect a lumber mill on the site. Work on the project is to start within the next few weeks.

One Hundred Years Ago

April 30, 1921

Last December Mrs. Charles Barquist sent some Garfield County huckleberries to her sister in Florida, a joint owner of Wakefield Preserving Company. In February at the state annual fair, Mrs. Wakefield put some of this fruit on exhibition with some of her own products. The Washington fruit was pronounced much finer than the rest.

After searching half a dozen residences, a party of revelers came across Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Adams at the home of his brother, Harry Adams, and routed them out of bed at midnight. Anticipating a frolic at their expense, the newly married couple allowed themselves to be shadowed early in the evening to the home of Carl Adams, where, presumably they would spend the night. This home was searched and then the house where the couple were to set up housekeeping and one or two more houses before the elusive pair was found. The joy of the festivities following the chase repaid all efforts put forth by the huntsmen, they say.

One Hundred Twenty-Five Years Ago

April 25, 1896

The shoe vender from Pendleton who has been raking in the shekels in the opera house, has folded his tent. He will not be missed.

The race between Whitmore’s “Newt” and Ousley’s “Dick Yager” resulted in an easy victory for the latter.

Boys, please do not scratch the paper from the windows of the new church. Such conduct casts a reflection on your home training, besides being an expensive pastime.

Some of our alleys and back dooryards need cleaning up. Pomeroy has always had the name of being the most healthful town in Eastern Washington as well as the cleanest. Let us keep up the record.

The splendid condition in which the beautiful Brady residence has been put has caused a flutter of expectancy in the breasts of some of the Pomeroy damsels, all of whom (with probably two exceptions) are wondering who will share with the handsome merchants.

The “soiled doves,” mentioned in our last, are still committing depredations in the Falling Springs vicinity. Terrorizing little children is their latest departure. Are the people of this community going to submit to such outrages without a murmur?

The Sunday school at the Cox schoolhouse was somewhat disappointed Sunday as their literature did not come but all listened with much interest to Mrs. Kimbrough while she read and commented on the lesson. We were sorry that so many of the young men left Sunday school to play baseball.

The cold wave and hailstorm that struck the Tukanon vicinity last Tuesday was the severest in 25 years at this time of the year. Hail and snow fell to the depth of an inch and laid on all night and a very heavy freeze followed which damaged the fruit pretty badly.