Nearby History: Palouse agriculture takes flight with equipment innovations

Last week I wrote about how our Palouse landscape of steep rolling hills was formed by blowing dust from sediments deposited in the Columbia Basin by the Spokane Floods of the last Ice Age.

Last Monday night I was driving home late from Spokane, and I experienced that rolling landscape first hand as we traveled the twisting roads. As we descended from Spangle to Rosalia, through Oakesdale and Garfield to Palouse, I looked out at the endless shadowy fields on the west and the fields and forested hills on the east, and imagined myself as a rock rolling over the landscape in the bursting floodwaters of Glacial Lake Missoula. As we rounded the corners and bumped over occasional railroad tracks, I felt our landscape's geologic history quite literally. At Palouse we began to ascend again. Then it was up over the shoulder of Moscow Mountain, down into the valley and home.

The 19th and 20th century newcomers to the Palouse were somewhat aware of the biological richness of the landscape they settled, but also brought with them the concept of producing food through agriculture, and obtaining a living via a cash crop.

The Palouse Prairie beckoned for raising wheat and pulse crops. At first only the lower and shallower slopes were farmed, but human ingenuity changed that.

Several men whose innovations changed the face of agriculture lived here in the eastern Palouse. After grain harvest was mechanized, the first harvesting machines were drawn by horses. The heads of grain were cut and taken back to the farm for threshing. Later the cutting equipment was combined with the threshing equipment into a combine. These early combines could weigh up to 11 tons and needed teams of 20 to 44 horses to pull them.

Moscow blacksmiths Cornelius Quesnell and Andrew Anderson developed a combine that weighed a tenth as much, and was pushed rather than pulled, by a team of only two horses. With funding from Gainford Mix and Jerome J. Day they founded the Idaho National Harvester Company to produce their invention.

Willis Rhodes, another local entrepreneur, also developed an effective smaller machine, the Rhodes Harvester.

Since a thresher had to run on level ground, there was a lever that a human operator adjusted as the combine changed terrain. In 1941, Raymond Hanson (born and raised in Palouse, Wash.) was riding on a combine and operating the leveling lever. He was inspired to develop an automatic leveling device, which made harvesting more convenient and efficient. The company he founded produced leveling systems exclusively for John Deere combines from 1946 to 1995. The self-leveling design was used worldwide in canal building and land reclamation machinery. A prolific inventor, Hanson held 100 patents when he died in 2009.

Improved equipment allowed farmers to farm higher on the Palouse hills. Another innovation which further improved their access to the steepest hills, was crop dusting. The late "Pete" Fountain of Moscow was a flying instructor for both universities when he first moved to Moscow after World War II. He saw that airplanes could be used in agriculture for applying fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides. He and his crew adapted a fleet of small planes for this purpose, designing and retrofitting their own equipment. In 1962 Pete purchased eight CallAir A-9 airplanes, introducing to Latah County the first generation of aircraft designed specifically for agricultural use.

The bursting of ice dams fifteen thousand years ago shaped our landscape, which shaped in turn our local history of agricultural innovation.

Joann Jones is curator emeritus for the Latah County Historical Society. joann.jones27@yahoo.com