the Timeless Palouse

A rich history of agriculture and education in the Palouse has created a thriving community filled with farmers, scientists, engineers, artists and scholars.

Rolling hills, sweeping vistas, towering buttes and low-lying creek beds all teeming with life, no matter the season; these are just a few of the things you can observe on the Palouse. Whether you call this region your home, you fondly return to visit your alma mater, or you simply have had the pleasure of driving through, you know the Palouse offers so much more than beautiful views. An agricultural hub and educational destination, the Palouse plays a pivotal role in the production of food, research and technology.

The Palouse region of Washington state and Idaho covers over 4,000 square miles of rich loessy hills with an even richer history. At the heart of the Palouse, the City of Pullman flourishes at the junction of three small rivers and creeks flowing through the ancestral homelands of the Upper Palouse and Nez Perce tribes. Settled by nonindigenous communities in the 1870s, the Pullman area quickly became home to a few hundred small farmers and ranchers. The first train arriving in 1885 kicked off a century of continual growth and the establishment of the Agricultural College, Experiment Station, and School of Science of the State of Washington in 1892. Artesian wells were also discovered in the Pullman area, which fed the growing city until they went dry in the 1970s.

Pullman drew in more farmers as word of the darkly colored, nutrient-dense soils spread towards Walla Walla and the Columbia Basin. The bunchgrass prairies had served as excellent pasture lands for several generations prior, but now, the rolling hills of the Palouse were growing wheat and other

Nobody is quite sure who should get credit as being Pullman's first settler. One popular story goes like this:

In 1875, a man named Bolin Farr, in search of a homestead site, camped beside a Palouse meadow where three creeks were joined together. All night long, the gurgling water lulled his sleep. “Here,” said he, “is where I’ll stake my homestead, and call it Three Forks Ranch."

Farr set aside a tract of land and platted it to town lots, after which he cast about to find a name befitting such a place. George Pullman of the Pullman Company chanced to be a friend, so in his honor, Three Forks was renamed Pullman.

In 1890, the state legislature picked Pullman as the location for the new state college.

The decision followed a lengthy and controversial site selection process lasting more than a year.

In 1941, near Palouse, Washington, Raymond A. Hanson conceived of a self-leveling mechanism for hillside combines. Tiltinghead hillside combines had been invented in the 1890s, and leveling was absolutely necessary on the steep hills of the Palouse. But before the Hanson invention, manual leveling required a person to stand on the combine platform and adjust the machine to the lay of the land – a tedious, dangerous job.

Innovations like this have helped to unlock the Palouse hills as the best land in America for growing dryland wheat.