A8 • HERMISTONHERALD.COM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 2018
NATIONAL AG WEEK
Historical society strikes
‘Umatilla Gold’ with grant
COLUMN
Livingston: BMCC
agriculture connects
locals to education
Exhibit will open in 2019,
tell the history of wheat
in Eastern Oregon
By ANNE LIVINGSTON
BLUE MOUNTAIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE
A
By ANTONIO SIERRA
STAFF WRITER
Mineral mining was more preva-
lent elsewhere in the American West,
but a Umatilla County Historical Soci-
ety exhibit will make the case that the
county is bountiful with a gold all its
own.
The historical society has been
working on “Umatilla Gold: The His-
tory of Wheat in Umatilla County” for
years, but a recent large grant from a
private foundation meant the nonprofit
could finally publicize the project.
With the help of Formations Inc.,
the Portland consultant that con-
structed the SAGE Center’s exhibits in
Boardman, the historical society plans
to give locals and visitors an interac-
tive tour through the history of a crop
that’s nearly synonymous with Uma-
tilla County.
The exhibit
While the majority of the exhibit
deals with the past two centuries, it also
covers millions of years of the region’s
history.
After an introduction, visitors will
learn the geological history of Eastern
Oregon, from the sediment that was
deposited during and after the ice age
to the volcanic effect that created the
“bones of the region,” according to a
2017 outline of the exhibit.
The museum will also include a sec-
tion on the indigenous people of the
Columbia Basin, including the tribes
that would come to form the Confed-
erated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation.
From there, the exhibit will skip
ahead to 1862, a big year for Umatilla
County’s agriculture sector.
At the national level, President
Abraham Lincoln signed the Home-
stead Act, which entitled men older
than 21 to any unclaimed 160-acre par-
cel of land. Domestic migrants from
the Oregon Trail and the Willamette
Valley poured into Eastern Oregon, as
did European immigrants from abroad.
More locally, Umatilla County was
CONCEPTUAL ART CONTRIBUTED BY UMATILLA COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The “Umatilla Gold: History of Wheat in Umatilla County” has received a $121,780
grant and will open in 2019 at the Heritage Station Museum in Pendleton.
created just as a Baker County gold
rush created demand for wheat.
While early settlers used wheat for
subsistence farming, the grain industry
started to flourish in the late 19th and
early 20th century in places like Pend-
leton, Adams, Athena, Weston, Pilot
Rock, Echo, Buttercreek and the Uma-
tilla Indian Reservation.
Those years saw farmers embrace
mechanical reapers, tractors and vehi-
cles while they grew and harvested the
wheat before shipping it off on rail or
boat to other markets. During the Great
Depression, farmers formed the Pend-
leton Grain Growers co-op to help keep
farms from closing.
The exhibit eventually transitions
to modern wheat farming and its lat-
est trends like no-till farming and
auto-steering tractors that use GPS for
more precise rows during plowing,
seeding, fertilizing and harvesting.
Like the SAGE Center in Board-
man, “Umatilla Gold” will have inter-
active elements to the exhibit.
Molding gold
While the Umatilla County His-
torical Society has featured many dif-
ferent exhibits at the Heritage Station
Museum in Pendleton over the years,
executive director Barbara Lund-Jones
said they’ve never had an exhibit that
focuses exclusively on wheat.
Board president Tom Winn, a retired
wheat farmer, said modern changes in
the industry means that it’s time to pre-
serve history. Although agriculture is
still an economic driver in the region,
farm consolidation and the advent of
new agricultural technology means
fewer people are farming than they
used to.
The historical society sketched out
its first exhibit outline in 2015, but the
nonprofit refrained from going pub-
lic until recently. It had been steadily
raising money from organizations like
Umatilla County Economic Develop-
ment, the Oregon Heritage Founda-
tion and the Pacific Power Founda-
tion when it got big news from the MJ
Murdock Charitable Trust — the char-
ity was granting the historical soci-
ety $121,780 toward fabricating and
installing the exhibit.
“Umatilla Gold” has an estimated
cost of $354,873, and the histori-
cal society has already raised money
needed for planning and programming,
as well as the concept design. The non-
profit is continuing to raise money for
the final design while the Murdock
trust dollars will go toward the final
construction phase, which has a total
cost of $287,113. When the exhibit
opens in 2019, Lund-Jones said it will
fit into Pendleton’s growing tourism
industry and downtown area.
“Umatilla Gold” is expected to be a
steady feature of the Heritage Station
for years to come. As one of the condi-
tions of the Murdock grant, the exhibit
will have to stay open for at least 10
years.
griculture is a big player in the Eastern
Oregon economy. More than 37 percent of the
workforce in Umatilla County is either directly
or indirectly employed by the agriculture industry.
And farm sales in Umatilla County exceed $1 billion
annually. As the industry continues to grow and become
more technologically advanced, producers are finding
that working together with a local community college
is a wise investment in fortifying their employee teams.
The Blue Mountain Community College agriculture
department works closely with the eastern Oregon and
southeastern Washington region’s ag industry.
Training and education is built to suit the needs of
agriculture. In the last year, crop producers, irrigation
specialists, suppliers and others have worked with
BMCC to provide a series of short workshops in
specialty areas to advance the knowledge and skills of
those already in the workforce. Eight workshops were
developed on topics ranging from agricultural safety
to soils, irrigation design to base stations and controls,
moisture monitoring and remote sensing to managing
crop production through proper use of irrigation
technology. One workshop focused on welding. The
workshops were scheduled through November and
February on Fridays for four hours each.
The format of these workshops met the industry need
both in length and the “offseason” time of year.
Each of the four workshops in February were
delivered using Internet technology (Zoom) which
allowed students to benefit from the classes without
having to travel. Students ranged in age from 16-75
and participated from as far away as Parma, Idaho,
and Othello, Wash. Most workshops averaged 18
participants.
BMCC has plans to continue these workshops. And
with continued input from ag industry managers and
their BMCC ag advisory board, plans to expand the
curriculum to include more topics and students next
winter.
In the meantime, BMCC’s Precision Irrigated
Agriculture Facility, located on the Oregon State
University Hermiston Agricultural Research and
Experiment Center, and the Facility for Agricultural
Resource Management on the BMCC Pendleton
campus has traditionally formatted courses that focus
on a long list of agricultural topics. Traditional and
nontraditional students know that BMCC is connected
with industry employee managers, and BMCC is
connecting these students with the education they need
to keep up with an agriculture industry that is changing
every day.
■
Anne Livingston is the director of Marketing for Blue
Mountain Community College in Pendleton.
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