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Toppenish - "Where the West Still Lives"

© Jerri Brooker

Toppenish was a lot different in 1950 than it is today. Even so, American Indian and Western cultures still exist in this now tourist-laden 1907-incorporated town located in the Yakima Indian Reservation in southeast Washington.

Fifty years ago the town was divided by railroad tracks lined with veranda-clad hotels and stores where hop and fruit pickers packed the town on Saturday nights during harvest season to have a good time.

The Yakima Indian ceremonial building was central to the American Indians that lived there and their customs, including a yearly Christmas celebration that lasted about three weeks. At that time the building accommodated 300 folks. The Shakers also used the building for their services. The town's social biggie of the year was the annual Pioneer Dinner.

Agriculture was a huge part of the community. Potatoes played a part in the creation of the Northern Pacific Railway advertising slogan, "Route of the Big Potato." Another crop, sugar beets, was grown and processed at the nearby Utah-Idaho Sugar Beet Company where a 2,100-horsepower steam turbo-generator supplied electric power for 210 factory motors and factory lights. The 24-hour factory was very advanced then for its engineering methods employed to process the beets into molasses and sugar. At that time 260 pounds of sugar was extracted from each ton of beets. The factory's daily load was 1,600 to 2,000 tons of beets. Railroad tracks ran behind the buildings.

During that period The Home Museum existed on Chestnut Street, with exhibits of Indian saddles, painted buffalo hides, war bonnets, and ornamented buckskin dresses among other treasures.

Today the town boasts the Yakima Valley Rail and Steam Museum, the Toppenish Historical Museum, the American Hop Museum and the Yakima Nation Cultural Center - quite a feat for a town of about 7,900 residents.

Toppenish has done a lot to preserve its cultural history. In 1989 the Toppenish Mural Society came to life to honor the town's history through murals painted on town buildings. The first mural, collaborated and painted in one day by 15 artists, was the first of 34 in the town by 1994. The Society won several awards for its work, including the Governor's Art Award. The town had been recuperating from a financial slump, and this helped bring it back to life. You can take a Conestoga Wagon Tour if you are not up to walking and driving to look at all of the murals.

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