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DALLESPORT, WASH., HAS HAD THREE OTHER NAMES

Once the seat of government of Klickitat county, Washington and twice a ghost town, Dallesport, postoffice and S.P. & S. R.R. station, occupying the southermost tip of the mid-Columbia country of the Evergreen state, is staging a comeback and making a bid to become an important inland shipping point and the port of the Yakima valley.
And Dallesport is unique in the Pacific northwest, if not in the nation, in that it has been known since its history began in the mid 50's of the 19th century, by three other names in addition to the present official designation.
Dallesport came into being as Rockland before Washington territory was severed for Old Oregon; territory by congressional act, signed by the president in 1853. At that time it was the only community of Klickitat county with any vestige of white settlement, and naturally became the county seat when the territory was established.
Rockland was an important transportation center for two decades. It was there that subsistence goods for the Yakima Valley, which was originally settled, as was Klickitat county, by stock raisers. For several years flour, milled at Albany on the Willamette, moved up the Columbia and was transferred to wagon trains, which moved from Rockland, via Goldendale and over the Satus Pass by a tortuous road into the Yakima Valley to supply the bread needs of stock ranch housewives. It is interesting to note, however, that in the late 1860's this flour commerce up the Columbia ended, and in the old Mountaineer, The; Dalles weekly newspaper, the editor observed that Willamette and Columbia river steamboat lines, allied with waterborne service to Puget Sound points, were delivering the Albany flour to the latter points at a substantially lower rate than Columbia river steamboats had been willing to deliver the product at The Dalles or Rockland. Right then Puget Sound became the gateway for the Yakima valley instead of The Dalles and Rockland.
As settlement of the fertile sagebrush and bunchgrass valleys to the east of the Klickitat river in Klickitat county increased, Goldendale increased in Population, and in November, 1878, eleven years before Washington gained statehood, the people voted to transfer the seat of government to Goldendale, where it has since located, although two years ago residents of Lyle succeeded in getting to ballot a proposition that the county seat be transferred to Lyle. It was voted down by a substantial majority.

Industrial Town Visioned

Rockland, although it remained the Washington landing of a ferry plying between it and The Dalles, became decadent until the turn of the past century. Then, anticipated by a number of years, the coming of a railroad on the north bank of the Columbia, a group of promoters, laid out a townsite, changed the name of the place to Granddalles and proceeded with the promotion of a shoe factory and a huge pottery works. Records of incorporation filed in Wasco County, called for an authorized capital stock of $25,000 for the pottery plant. A huge frame building was built for one of the factories. It stood there on the flat land between the river and the Klickitat hills in the background until a few years ago when its burning furnished a spectacular bonfire.

Site of Airport

The ambitions schemes of the Granddalles promoters failed to jell. The stakes, set by survey in laying out a townsite rotted or were upset by grazing sheep or cattle. Granddalles became as decadent as had Rockland before it. Then 10 years ago, the community, where hovered the ghost of past commercial dreams, came into prominence when The Dalles, on; the Oregon side of the Columbia chose the flatland there as an airport. A group of progressive citizens chipped in and created a fund for buying an acreage, since leased to the federal government. The department of commerce now maintains a secondary landing field, equipped with radio station and beam. Soon a group of citizens, headed by L.A. Duncan, launched an agricultural enterprise. They established an irrigation district, watering the land with a supply pumped by electricity from the Columbia.

Townsite Being Revived

Since then, while the area brought to cultivation has not been large, the land has been proven ideal for production of early strawberries and garden truck and alfalfa. Not content with agricultural development, however, the new promoters, set about to revive a townsite. They were given spur to their undertakings when a shiplock was built at Bonneville dam, and plans set in motion to gain a dredging of the Columbia's channel to a 27-foot depth by 1941, thus making possible the launching of ocean vessels at a distance nearly 200 miles inland from the Pacific. They petitioned for and secured an official change of the name Granddalles to Northdalles. The postoffice and railway station were so known until the postal authorities complained that the name was in conflict with another Washington postal station. It was then that the name Dallesport was applied.
Today a modern arterial motor highway extends up into central Washington over the Satus Pass by way of Goldendale. Closely paralleling it will be the main transmission line, which will couple Bonneville and Grand Coulee electric generators.
L.L. Buchanan, Yakima motor transport operator, a pioneer in such movement of freight, and associates, recently closed a deal for a site on the basalt bluffs of the Columbia, just west of the Dallesport railway station. This, concern, which first began to move freight by motor truck in 1914 and which today maintains large warehouses in Seattle and Yakima, is Planning again to make Dallesport a gateway between the Yakima valley and the outside world. Mr. Buchanan announces that immediate construction of water terminals will be started at Dallesport to include a tank farm for 300,000 gallons of gasoline. Mr. Buchanan plans to make Dallesport the point of interchange for agricultural grown annually to the extent of 50,000 carloads in the Yakima valley, at least that portion of them dispatched to markets of the outside world. He plans, too, to transfer at Dallesport from watercraft to motor trucks imported articles of subsistence for Yakima fruit growers and farmers. He declares that he has his eyes on the great fruit tonnage of Yakima valley and when European war clouds have cleared he proposes to erect cold storage terminals at Dallesport, in order that they may feed the holds of refrigerator ships, up the Columbia, back of two mountain ranges to take on apple and pear cargoes for ports of the United Kingdom and continental Europe.