13 The Guilland House in Yakima City, now Union Gap, in 1884.
renamed Union Gap. Meantime, businessmen did their darndest to attract more people and industry to the new town. In the May 1889 issue of The Northwest Magazine, a story touted North Yakima under the headline “A Verdant, Blooming Town in the Midst of Highly Fertile Valleys.” “It is ‘water, water everywhere,’ pure, cold and sparkling, and yet there are no damp marshy or malarial places in the valleys, because the streams keep in their natural courses until turned into the winding irrigating ditches which may be seen in all directions following the bench lands like huge serpents,” C.M. Barton wrote. The story goes on to describe the city as “laid out on a broad gauge plan, with electric lights and waterworks about to be put in, with a fine new brick hotel, a spacious opera house, a dozen brick blocks, two new elegant brick bank buildings, sixty business houses, hundreds of frame modern residences, a half dozen beautiful sites for the Capitol of the State of Washington when it is located here, as it ought to be, 5,500 people who look as if A n n u a l 2 0 1 0
Some of the Pioneer Daughters stand outside the Centennial Building with owner H.J. Cahalan (left) in a photo taken about 1951. The Centennial Building was one of the 50 moved in 1885.
they had came to stay and do not wander around the streets with a far away gaze, busy merchants with stores well filled with customers, thrifty farmers who ship their produce from the city, none of the ‘tough’
element, several churches and schools, a charming climate and grand mountain scenery.” By some accounts, the New Town was designed to resemble Schulze’s hometown, Baden-Baden in Germany. A ditch was built to bring water from the Naches River to the city. Ten years after the Big Move, Schulze would be dead. He committed suicide in Tacoma in April 1895 — shooting himself in the head with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver — shortly after Northern Pacific requested his resignation. Another key player behind the move, Martin Van Buren Stacy, a wealthy landowner who often stayed at the Guilland Hotel, died in an insane asylum. Yakima never did become the state capitol. But the “grand mountain scenery” and some of those brick blocks remain. The original boxcar depot has long since been replaced. The 1910 station — built during the city’s silver jubilee — is now home to a restaurant and lounge. But it remains in the heart of downtown, an enduring testament to Yakima’s railroad origins. YA K I M A — T H E B E G I N N I N G | 1 3