MOSES LAKE - With 2011 winding down fast and 2012 heading our way, take a few minutes to reflect on the old year, but concentrate on the new year. Think of ways to make your actions positive. When faced with a negative situation change it to a positive situation. Just do it...

Wishing all the best New Year ever.

Columbia Basin history

The Grant County Historical Society has compiled several volumes of Grant County history. The books are available for purchase at the Historical Society Museum gift shop in Ephrata.

I bought the series in 2009 and secured permission to relay some of the history through this column.

Memories of Grant County, compiled from taped interviews by the Grant County Historical Society.

Today we backtrack a bit and then continue the story of Ephrata, by Ed Harvill, recorded on Oct. 11, 1977:

The hill up on the back where the reservoir is was included in the farm, all of Grandview Heights and beyond. So it was quite a large place and it was a tremendous drive, $5,000. But the thing you want to remember is that those $5,000 were hard to come by, especially with 12 percent interest, when you didn't have the money.

Now, the farm had an orchard on it, again, and it seems that our experience in orchards hasn't been planted many years earlier. It had a lot of oddball varieties of apples. There were some good peaches, apricots and an old crabapple tree. I don't know how many boxes of fruit we sold off those trees, but the rest of them were varieties like Wolf River, Grimes Golden, to name a few. Also some Delicious, but they were the common type, and some old Arkansas Blacks, the only Arkansas Black tree I ever saw.

Those apples could be picked in the fall, put in the basement and maybe by June of the following year you could bite into them. That orchard we kept for several years and really I don't think there was ever a dime made off of it, except for the fruit like peaches and apricots we sold.

Looking at Ray Deycous over here, I am sure he remembers thinning apples out there. Carl and I and Ray would start very religiously to thin, but along about 15 or20 minutes or maybe two hours, we'd start having an apple fight. That's no reflection against Ray. He had some help, he couldn't fight by himself.

Something I have left out; my first ride in a car at 60 miles an hour. I attended a birthday party at Nat Washington's hours, probably our sixth or seventh. He father had an old Cleveland. So after we had cake he took us out on the highway in that car and we rode 60 miles an hour. That was a real trip with that car with the top down and gravel road and a bunch of screaming kids, but that was really fun.

E-mail from Cheryl

Facts from the past gleaned from the Moses Lake Herald, Columbia Basin Herald and The Neppel Record by Cheryl (Driggs) Elkins:

From the Columbia Basin Herald on Jan. 21, 1949:

Dennis note: This story appears to be about the Federal Government taking lands which were privately owned and putting it under Federal control. As I understand the situation, the lands were supposed to be returned to the landowners someday, but this did not happen. I'm still asking readers to help me with this part of Columbia Basin history. Read on.

We backtrack a bit and then continue with an article with the headline, "Wahluke area withdrawal hit by Chamber"

Landowners in the area involved, some of whom have conferred with the Bureau of Reclamation officials, may register an organized protest.

The Atomic Energy Commission's recently announced program to purchase 63,000 acres in Grant and Franklin counties will bring to 88,000 acres the government's holdings for its Hanford works. A total of 102,000 acres outside this area, known as the "secondary zone," has been withdrawn from the irrigation project by the AEC, but no plans to purchase it have been announced.

Blow to project

The Moses Lake Chamber action, taken at its dinner meeting Tuesday night in the grade school cafeteria, pointed out that if these 102,000 acres is needed by the AEC, it should be purchased instead of left on the hands of private owners and prohibited from development.

The area contains one of the largest blocks of high class land in the entire project and its loss would be a blow to the economy of the irrigation program, the chamber resolution declared.

Copies of the resolution are to be sent Senators Warren G. Magnuson and Harry P. Cain and Congressman Hal Homes, in whose district the property lies.

Loen Bailie of Mesa, newly elected president of the state reclamation association, a member of the Columbia Basin Commission and chairman of the directors of the south district, has declared,

"It is not reasonable to expect the property owners to hold the land indefinitely and pay taxes on it when it may never be opened. Two-thirds of the south district's acreage is taken out or deferred by orders withdrawing the Wahluke Slope, and we aren't going to take it lying down."

Dam not affected

Bailie said conferences will be held at Pasco and elsewhere in the south district to determine what course of action to take. Frank T. Bell of Ephrata and C.C. Dill of Spokane, members of the Columbia Basin Commission, are in Washington, D.C. and are expected to be authorized to represent the state in investigating the situation there.

Most of the land affected would have been irrigated by a branch canal passing through the Scooteney Siphon, 14 miles northwest of Connell. About 5,000 acres withdrawn would have been irrigated from the southerly portion of the Potholes East Canal, beyond the point where the Wahluke branch was to take off.

This canal leads from O'Sullivan Dam. O'Sullivan Dam is virtually complete and its design is not affected. Neither does the Wahluke withdrawal make any difference in the plans for Potholes West Canal, which will irrigate a stretch of land from Taunton to Smyrna, north of Saddle Mountains.

What additional costs may be assessed against water users because of the reduced acreage has not been determined, if any, bureau officials said.

More of this story next week.