Farming Opportunities (promotional booklet)

The Columbia Basin Project was the irrigation half of the Grand Coulee Dam enterprise: complete a dam on the Columbia River, use it to pump water up into a vast network of canals, and convert roughly a million acres of semi-arid plateau in central Washington into farmland. Grand Coulee Dam — at its completion in early 1942 the largest concrete structure in the world — was designed from the start with that pumping function in mind. By 1947, with the dam generating power and the Main Canal under construction, the Bureau of Reclamation needed settlers for the land it was about to water.

Congress had given World War II veterans preference for homestead units on federal reclamation projects. The Bureau answered the wave of inquiries by compiling the twenty-four most common questions and answering them plainly. The booklet covers available acreage (approximately 1,029,000 acres authorized), water delivery schedules, land classification, purchase prices, and farm-development costs. It also names the towns where settlers could find services: Soap Lake and Ephrata in the north; Quincy to the northwest; Moses Lake, Othello, and Warden in the central area; Connell and Pasco in the south. The tone is measured — it notes that fully developing an average farm would cost $7,000–$9,000 (roughly $100,000–$125,000 today), typically spread over ten to fifteen years after settlement.

The first block slated for water was the Pasco Pump Unit — 5,361 acres northwest of Pasco, divided into 76 individual farm units. At the time of printing the booklet promised delivery by spring 1948; water arrived on May 15, 1948. The project's soil was sorted into six classes by irrigation suitability, with Class 1 being the best irrigable cropland and Class 6 fit only for grazing. Pre-war dry-land appraised values ranged from $1–$2 per acre for Class 6 ground up to $30 per acre for better dry-farming land — figures that the arrival of water rights would multiply many times over. About 80% of the irrigable acreage was already in private hands, so most settlers would negotiate directly with existing landowners rather than homesteading government parcels.

The final page closes with an aerial photograph of Grand Coulee Dam and directs further inquiries to Bureau offices at Coulee Dam and Ephrata, Washington — the small Grant County town that served as the project's administrative headquarters, roughly 80 miles southwest of the dam.