Sunday, Feb. 01, 2009

Pasco family part of Franklin County history since 1889

By Joe Chapman, Herald staff writer

PASCO -- When the five Harris siblings get together to reminisce, the story of their family's history is also Pasco's history.

Alvin, Mary, Gertrude, Wallace and Lucille have been sharing photographs and trading anecdotes of Pasco's old days ever since they grew up during them, back in the 1920s and '30s.

All five siblings were born in Pasco, and although a couple of them moved away and returned again at one time or another, they all count themselves as Pasco residents now.

From oldest to youngest, the family includes Lucille Olsen, 94; Wallace Harris, 93; Gertrude Knopp, 92; Mary Ketchersid, 82; and Alvin Harris, 80. A third brother, William Harris, died in 1996.

Susan Faulkner, a Kennewick genealogist, prompted a recent gathering of the clan at Wallace's home, where she recorded an interview with them for the Franklin County Historical Society. Faulkner stumbled on the Harrises after learning about their parents while working on a book about Pasco for Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series.

Their father, Fred Harris, arrived in the area with his family in 1889, when he was 2 years old.

"You can't get much closer to the actual history of the founding of Pasco than that," Faulkner said.

As she tells it, Fred moved to Ainsworth, which existed before Pasco was incorporated in 1891. He helped his grandfather, who he moved here with, disassemble a building in Ainsworth and rebuild it in Pasco.

"And the whole town of Ainsworth moved to Pasco," Faulkner said.

When the Harris siblings were growing up, the town had a high school and two elementary schools, and it didn't stretch any farther west than 20th Avenue. The city's population was no more than 3,500.

The Harrises operated a diversified farm that produced everything from pigs and cows to wheat and garden vegetables, and it provided the largest milk delivery route in Pasco before 1940. The milk route was a virtual grocery store on wheels, also selling eggs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese and sheep.

None of the customers had refrigeration back then, and few had ice. So people would leave a burlap-covered box in their yard and run water over it to keep it cool enough for milk to be left in it, Lucille said.

"In the summertime, they ran the route morning and at night because milk would keep better than if it was set in the sun a lot," she said.

Gertrude -- the designated "rememberer" of the Harris bunch (her knack for detail was bolstered by a writing class she took) -- worked outside most of the time and handled chicken slaughtering duties.

"I butchered thousands of chickens," she said with a grin evoking that of a wolf with a feather caught in his teeth.

She'd clamp the chicken with her knees, snap its neck and slit its throat, she said. Then she'd toss the bird in a bucket until it quit flopping before hanging it upside-down on a clothesline to drain the blood.

"Some people thought I was pretty bad," she said. But she never minded the duty.

All the family members stayed busy, each with their own jobs, so they had trouble coming together to break bread together.

"So we decided dinner was going to be at a certain time," Gertrude recalled, "and whoever's not there on time has to put in -- was it a penny? -- for every minute."

After a while, they had enough to buy six cans of Ghirardelli Cocoa, she said.

Wallace took over the delivery route in 1935, but even before then he would help with the driving when needed. By the time he turned 16 in 1931, he had been driving for three years, he said.

The sheriff sold him a driver's license without testing him behind the wheel because Wallace agreed to make deliveries to the jail, he said.

When World War II came, Wallace was the right age to be drafted but he was spared that responsibility because his milk route provided a crucial service to the community.

The family ended up contributing to the war effort in another way when the Army seized their farmland and forced them to relocate about 12 miles to the west. Their farm was one of several others located where the Big Pasco Industrial Park is today, and the Army liked the spot for a warehouse center because of its access to the Columbia River and railroad tracks.

The Harrises picked up and moved to the family's current site just west of the Interstate 182 bridge.

Sixty years later, they again were called to give up land for the greater good when the state bought Alvin Harris' home for the bridge right of way.

Fred Harris, who lived to be 100, was an honorary superintendent and would ride out on a motorized scooter to check on the bridge's progress as they were building it.

"He always wanted to see it completed, and he did get to see it," recalled Lurene Fleshman, Wallace Harris' daughter.

* Joe Chapman: 509-582-1512; jchapman@tricityherald.com