Can ghosts save Colfax?
Editor’s note: Crosscut columnist Knute Berger has been examining the challenges facing Washington’s rural communities, even in the middle of a boom for urban areas. This is the first in an occasional series.
The rural idyll can be found on a road between the towns of Palouse and Colfax in Eastern Washington. The winding 17-mile stretch of Highway 272 is one of the most beautiful ribbons of country road in the state: rolling hills, old barns and farms, groves of tall pines. In springtime, the new wheat and lentil crops turn the hills into a sea of Irish green. Steptoe Butte is the high point in the region and the view from the top is spectacular, a counterpane that makes photographers salivate: undulating landscape stretches forever inviting an endless play of light and clouds.
If there is a farm country fantasy, this view distills it. Back in the ’80s, National Geographic ran a story on this unique geologic region we call the Palouse and called it an “American Paradise.” Others, including The Guardian, have called it “America’s Tuscany.”
Rural areas nationwide are struggling with unemployment, brain drain, loss of family farms. But the Palouse country is resilient. Whitman County is the largest producer of dry land wheat in the country.
If this were Tuscany, the central hill town would be Colfax. It’s not on a hill, however, but set in a valley where two branches of the Palouse River meet. It was founded as a good spot for mills (lumber and grain) and became the agricultural center and county seat. It’s not a romantic village but, of necessity, a workaday town. But it’s not unimaginative. Part of its history includes ghosts, and that touch of the supernatural could be a vital part of its future.
