Pullman

Where Three Creeks Meet

Pullman stands at the confluence of Missouri Flat Creek, Dry Creek, and the South Fork of the Palouse River, about 10 miles west of Moscow, Idaho, at an elevation of 2,552 feet.³ HistoryLink calls it by far the largest city in Whitman County, with nearly 30,000 residents, and Washington State University is the county’s largest employer.³

Three Forks and the Name Pullman

The Stevens Treaties of 1855 left the site of Pullman just inside the new Nez Perce Reservation, and another treaty in 1863 removed the reservation from Southeastern Washington.³ Local histories credit Bolin Farr with arriving in 1876 where a river and two creeks meet and naming his village Three Forks, while other versions put Daniel G. McKenzie first, in 1878.³ HistoryLink’s reading of the records holds that both men most likely settled on the site in 1877, McKenzie slightly ahead of Farr, in September.³ The story long told is that Farr’s supposed friend George Pullman, the Chicago railcar magnate, sent Farr and his neighbors $50 for the Fourth of July in 1881, and a grateful citizenry renamed the town for him.³ HistoryLink finds no evidence of a village called Three Forks, and gives the name to newcomer Orville Stewart, who in June 1881 set up an informal post office in his general store and named it Pullman.³ By that account the industrialist never had anything to do with the town, and the closest he came to it was a seat on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company.³ McKenzie and Charles Moore of Moscow, Idaho, combined plats drawn in 1881 and 1882 into the original townsite, which already held a blacksmith shop, a saloon, and a hotel.³

Two Railroads and the Artesian City

Farmers had paid the O. R. & N.’s high rates at Almota and Wawawai on the Snake River until the Columbia and Palouse Railway completed its line into Pullman in 1885.^2,3 The Northern Pacific’s Spokane and Palouse branch followed in 1887, giving a community of roughly 250 people access to ready markets at competitive rates.³ The town burned on June 26, 1887, and two business blocks were rebuilt in brick.⁵ Pullman was incorporated by court order on April 11, 1888, and after the state supreme court twice voided its standing, the court upheld it in 1894.² The College Hill nomination counts 23 businesses and over 300 residents in the town and says the years from 1888 to 1892 have been called Pullman’s “boom time.”¹ In May 1889 workers drilling a well for M. C. True, owner of the Palace Hotel on Main Street, struck a pressurized supply, the first of several artesian wells.³ The town burned a third time on July 3, 1890, yet the “Artesian City,” by then some 850 people, set out to keep its railroads and win the new state college.^3,5

The College on College Hill

Representative W.S. Oliphant introduced a grant in 1890 to establish a land-grant institution in Pullman, and on May 30, 1891, Pullman was chosen as the site, a decision then challenged in court.¹ Original enrollment stood at 84 students, all but 15 of them from Whitman County.¹ The Campus, Rose Park, and Chambers additions were all platted by 1905, and the nomination credits the building boom on College Hill with making Pullman the leading town in Whitman County by that year.¹ By 1910 the State College of Washington was serving 1,016 students, and Pullman had an additional 2,600 permanent residents.³ The United Presbyterians built a wooden church in 1899 for $4,000, and in 1913 moved it to the back of the lot, built a brick addition in front, and veneered the whole in Tenino sandstone for $50,000.⁶ That building, the Greystone, stood vacant for 25 years until Glenn and Melodie Petry of Pullman bought it in April 2004, and its renovation was completed in July 2005.⁶ In 1950 the Writers’ Program state guide reported test farming on a large scale at the Washington Agricultural Experiment Station at Pullman.⁷

Veterans, a University, and Deeper Water

The population went from 4,417 in 1940 to 12,022 in 1950, an increase of 172.2 percent, and HistoryLink gives the larger role to the “GI Bill.”^3,5 On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1949, George A. McIntyre, a veteran who had opened an electric repair shop on Grand Avenue, headed up the west side of brush-covered College Hill and killed three law-enforcement officers and a taxicab driver in a 40-minute gun battle.⁴ Enrollment swelled to more than 7,000 students, and in 1959 an act of the legislature made Washington State College into Washington State University.³ Edmund O. Schweitzer III joined the faculty after finishing his Ph.D. in engineering in 1977, and in 1982 he founded Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, which by 2014 employed nearly 3,800 people, about 2,000 of them at its complex in Pullman.³ The artesian wells tapped out in the 1970s, and the town now draws its water from an ancient volcanic reservoir buried beneath hundreds of feet of rock.³