Starting at the 'Bottom'

by Ed Stover

Flint, Wash. ...

Like pentimento artwork, the ghost image of the old town's name shows through the aging paint on the crumbling facade of what was once the McCurry Warehouse along Yakima Valley Highway between Sawyer and Buena.

Piety Flats ...

Another name lost in time, but a place in Yakima Valley lore, nonetheless - a pious place known for its God-fearing men and women, settlers who once raised their children and tilled the rich soil along the Yakima River between what is now Zillah on the south and Sunnyside Dam to the north.

Parker Bottom ...

Not a name that will ring a bell with the average Valley resident today. Unless, that is, you can trace your roots to the Bottom, or are old enough to remember going to the Davis Store at Donald as a child to buy penny candy, and listen to the old men as they yarned about the days when the Bottom was fit only for sagebrush, coyotes and rattlesnakes.

"I used to walk through here to school every day," says Willard Close, 75, leaning out the window of his pickup and wagging a finger toward a sun-washed field of alfalfa. At the center of the field is a towering structure, an old hop kiln, its boards blackened by time and weather.

"That kiln used to be where the freeway is now - they jacked it up and moved it over there just like it was a house," says Close, one of 13 children whose dad, Wiley, came to the Bottom in the 1920s.

Close remembers the old Davis Store, now Donald Fruit & Mercantile, a stone's throw east of Exit 44 off Interstate 82 south of Union Gap.

He went there as a boy. He's heard the stories about Parker Bottom, nicknamed Piety Flats - a sort of geographical nexus in the late 1800s for some of the Valley's first white families.

So has Dan McDonald, 79, and his son, Paul, 48.

Dan's great-grandfather, Capt. Robert Dunn, was a Civil War veteran who fought on the Union side at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and was wounded but survived the war to travel the Oregon Trail west. He and his wife, Annie, and their children wound up in the Yakima Valley.

One of those children, Maggie, almost didn't arrive.

"She fell off the wagon; she was just 2 years old and was asleep in the back of the wagon," says Dan, recalling the story passed down by his grandmother, Ella Dunn McDonald, the oldest of the captain's and Annie's five daughters and two sons.

No one missed Maggie until the wagons stopped at nightfall.

"The men rode back several miles; there she was, stumbling along, following the wagon tracks - if she had gone off in any other direction, she would have been lost or taken by the Indians," Dan says.

Instead, Maggie came to Parker Bottom, grew up, married and became the mother of Valley aviation pioneer Charlie McAllister.

Harlan Dunn, 57, another of the captain's great-grandsons, says a second close call on the trail west came when the rest of the wagon train - all but the battle-hardened Capt. Dunn and his family - turned back because of Indian hostilities. The year was 1876, the year Custer and his army were wiped out at Little Bighorn.

"Later, they got word that everyone else (all who had turned back) had been massacred - the Indians had caught up with them," says Harlan Dunn.

Capt. Dunn and his family, traveling at night and holing up during the day, arrived in the Valley unscathed. They settled in Parker Bottom, where the captain, a civil engineer by training, homesteaded and got interested in irrigation. He wanted to turn all that sagebrush into farmland.

"He surveyed and developed the Piety Flats Ditch," says Dan McDonald, explaining that the ditch, now filled in, was the forerunner of today's Sunnyside Canal.

Helping dig the ditch with horses pulling "slips" (scooplike implements) was the Rev. Isaac Flint, for whom Flint, Wash., was named. Actually, a road, "Flint Lane," still intersects the highway just north of the ruins of the old McCurry Warehouse. And the old home of Purdy Flint, one of the reverend's six children, was recently razed in a planned burn this past spring.

"I got an old doorknob from the house (before it burned)," says Yakima's Susan Paolella, 50, Isaac's great-great-granddaughter.

Paolella says Isaac Flint was one of the early ones, settling in the Bottom in 1869. But he wasn't the earliest. That distinction goes to a pair of cattle drovers, William Parker and John Allen, who in 1864 settled on rangeland along the river used by the early-day cattleman, Ben Snipes.

Parker, of course, is the man posterity remembers. The Bottom, and several geographical features - a bridge, two roads, a school, churches, and one community - all bear his name.

He was also apparently quite a man, according to the late A.J. Splawn, an early-day settler who, in his Yakima Valley history, "Ka-mi-akin: The Last Hero of the Yakimas," describes Parker as follows:

"... a noble, generous man, very remarkable in appearance, with dark eyes and long black hair hanging down to his shoulders, handsome, not only outwardly, but to the core. If I were called upon to select the best man I ever knew it would be Bill Parker ..."

One of the first structures built in the Bottom is still there - the so-called Mattoon Cabin, just off Yakima Valley Highway across from the Sawyer Mansion south of Donald. But the cabin was actually built in 1865 by one of Ben Snipes' cowboys, a man named Moore.

Whether J.P. Mattoon - an agricultural agent for the Yakama Nation - and his family actually lived in the cabin is open to question, though Splawn writes that the Mattoons did, in fact, live there for a time.

Fred Erickson, 68, who, with his wife, Patricia, owns the Sawyer Mansion, doubts that: "When (William Perry) Sawyer came (in 1892), the cabin was used for hired people ... It was used by the cowboys prior to when Sawyer lived here (in the mansion)," says Erickson.

Today, the Mattoon Cabin is inhabited by wildlife, dust and whatever else Mother Nature wants to send through its sagging windows and door. Indeed, the Mattoon Cabin could be a poster child for most-neglected historical artifacts in Yakima County.

"Look at that tree - you gotta see this loving tree," says Yakima Valley Museum volunteer Yvonne Wilbur, pointing out the large cottonwood against which the Mattoon Cabin leans.

A lot of Parker Bottom folks are interested in preserving the Mattoon Cabin, but cost is a factor and the cabin is on private ground.

Another structure almost as old, the Egbert French Trading Post built in 1867, has had better luck. That's because Dan McDonald has a vested interest in the old cabin - he was born there. Today, the cabin sits across the road from Donald Fruit & Mercantile, and is cared for by the McDonald family, for which Donald is named.

Of course, there are other longtime Parker Bottom families - the Peterses, the Pilands, the Hardisons, to name a few. And there are landmarks - Piland Bridge, Hardison Grove - which bear their names.

Many of these descendants still farm the land homesteaded by their forebears. And even if they don't live in the Bottom, their roots are there, and they go back, like Paolella, to turn the doorknob to a memory.

But to grow up and grow old on the land of your ancestors is a special privilege, says Maravine Piland Wertenberger, 83, who still lives on the farm homesteaded by her grandparents, James and Elizabeth Hardison, more than 100 years ago.

"Why, I just can't imagine living anywhere else," says Wertenberger. "This is home."

First published in the Yakima Herald on October 13, 2002.

Yakima Herald Features reporter Ed Stover can be reached by phone at 577-7628, or by e-mail at estover@yakima-herald.com.