My mother was born on September 3, 1914. She died in 2002 at age 88 of multiple cancers. She had four daughters spaced over 11 years. I thank Mary Nielson, her first cousin, for sending me this and all of mother's correspondence to Mary as they researched the Allard family history together. This picture was taken when she was 21. The Allard ranch house is pictured above lower left.
April 1982
A Family History for the White Bluffs-Hanford Pioneer Association and the Hanford Science Center, State of Washington
By: Verna H. (Chase) Thompson (Mrs. John E. Thompson)
2222 Sunset Drive, Venture, California 93001
Phone: (805) 648-7379
My maternal grandfather was Samuel (Sam) Allard of French descent. He was born March 3, 1859 in upper New York State. He came to the Priest Rapids Valley from Minnesota to the state of Washington in 1908, when he was about 49 years old. He left the town of Allard in the exodus of 1943 when the valley was evacuated by the United States Government for the Atomic Bomb project at Hanford, Washington. He moved to Prosser and died there December 5, 1945 at eh age of 86. (Penciled notes: If born in 1859- 83 if born in 1862. 3 Mar 1862 is on the grave marker. Born in Churubusco, N.Y.
Samuel (Sam) Allard first married Malvina Crompe, a Canadian French woman. They lived in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, and had four children, Emma, Rose, Helen (My mother), and Henry. They were of Catholic faith. My grandmother died at childbirth in 1888 when Henry was born. These children were all grown when Sam came west with his second wife, Delia, and their daughter, Anna. They had lost a baby boy to pneumonia following whopping cough in Minnesota.
Anna Allard later married Karl Becht. The Becht’s had a son, Karl Jr. and they lived in Priest Rapids in the early 1920’s where Karl Sr. worked on a large cattle ranch above the power plant and the home of the Wanapam Indian Settlement. Later, they moved to White Bluffs where Karl Sr. worked in the packing house. Karl Jr. graduated from White Bluffs High School in 1931. Later, the family moved to Yakima where Karl Sr. managed a packing house for many years.
My father was Vernon M. Chase. His maternal grandparents were the Peter Wheeler Sr’s who homesteaded in Wenatchee, Washington, in the 1860’s. The log cabin may still be standing on Wheeler Hill. (it was in 1984) My father came to the Allard ranch with me and my sister in 1922 when I was 8 years old because our mother was too ill to care for us. My father left with us in 1924 but he came back in 1932 and farmed the ranch again for Delia after she and Grandpa Allard parted ways. My father ran a shift at the power plant and there was a time when he accepted water bonds as pay! He left in the evacuation of 1943.
The first time that I saw the Sam Allard ranch on the Columbia River was in 1918 when I was 4 years old. My folks lived in Yakima, Washington, and my father had just purchased his first Model T car. Our horse and buggy were no longer welcome, so at 2 o’clock one fine morning (so that she would not have to buck traffic), my mother loaded my sister, Mildred, and I and a box of yelping puppies into the wagon and drove 45 long miles on dirt roads to her father’s ranch at Allard to deliver the horse and wagon. I remember our singing a lot on the way and yelling loudly on the turns so that we wouldn’t collide with oncoming traffic. Just before dark, tired and weary, we dropped down to the Columbia River at the Hydro Electric Pumping Station where Grandpa Allard worked and then on to the ranch. What a welcome sight it must have been for my mother and especially the horse!
Samuel Allard went to work as soon as he came to the Columbia River for the Hanford Irrigation and Power Company at Priest Rapids where the power plant was being constructed. He was later assigned chief operator at the new Hydro Electric Pumping Plant near his ranch at “Coyote Rapids” about half way between Priest Rapids and White Bluffs. The name was later changed to Allard in 1912. There was a “Whistle Stop” at the spot and a post office and general store which at one time was run by John Dumert, a rancher. He owned a crystal set. I remember that I heard my first sounds of transmitted voices when I put on the earphones at his place.
Sam and Delia owned about 200 acres of land just down river from the Dumert place. Grandpa worked in the power plant and they farmed their lower land between the canal and the river. The irrigation canal directed water by gravity from the pumping plant to White Bluffs and Hanford. Sam and Delia built a comfortable two story frame house trimmed with native stone. They burned driftwood in the huge stone fireplace and also in the wood stoves. After the water went down in the spring, a wealth of logs and lumber was snaked from the Columbia River. It was used for fences, wood, and farm buildings.
Huge cottonwood trees flanked the lane to the barnyard and Locust trees were planted around the house for shade. It was a beautiful view through the trees to the river. There was grass all around the house which the sheep “mowed” and an orchard and pasture. Alfalfa was grown for hay and in the early 1920’s Grandpa Allard and my father milked 14 cows. The milk and cream was sold and picked up by “Sagebrush Annie”, a spur of the Milwaukee R.R. In 1913, Sam was put in charge of the Priest Rapids Power Plant for several years when the Hanford Irrigation and Power Company went into receivership. Then, he came back to Allard to run the pumping plant again. Sam put up with farming, but Delia was a real farm woman. She saw that a family garden was planted and that all the work got done. Sam was really an electrician, motorman, and a politician.
In 1921, Sam Allard was president of the White Bluffs Commercial Club and later was a post master of the local grange. From 1922 through 1926, Sam served as a County Commissioner of Benton County. Sam, with H.E. Robinson and Ed Loveland were instrumental in organizing the first White Bluffs band. They made the first donations and aided in raising further funds to purchase instruments for the group. They were present in parades around the county. (A picture of the group, including Sam in the straw hat, was on the wall at the Hanford Science Center last year.) Fred English, the White Bluffs druggist, was a director of the band at one time. Sam was a very kind man. There were times that he brought wards of the court to the ranch where they stayed for awhile until resettled. Sam and Delia found plenty of chores for them to do.
My grandfather befriended the Wanapam Indians. For years they liked to come to the lower part of the ranch in the spring from Priest Rapids and stay awhile, where they hunted and fished. They had a sweat house that they steamed in and then would make a dash into the cold waters of the Columbia. They came down the lane in front of the ranch house with their wagons and horses and made a colorful procession. Sometimes they stopped at the barnyard and my grandfather or my father might give them the head of a cow that was just butchered which they made good use of. There were times at night that I could hear their pow wows which my grandfather sometimes attended. I never played with their children. If I happened upon them, they would run away. I guess they were told not to go onto the ranch and to stay to themselves. John Buck, the Wanapam Chief, helped my grandfather during haying season if help was desperately needed. The Dreamer Drummer religion did not believe in hard work! I remember John Buck coming to the train stop at Allard in 1924 and saying goodbye to my father when we left for Florida. He was sorry that my father did not have sons to carry on his name.
During haying season the hired men would come up to the house at noon and wash up at the canal. Once, one man complained about the heat and he was pushed off the plank into the water and there was much laughter. Then they would come into the big kitchen for a hearty meal that Delia prepared. Sometimes they ate red juicy watermelon from the field off the back of the hay wagon. I liked to ride atop the hay to the barn where it was fork lifted into the hay loft. Rattlesnakes were killed in the fields nearly every day during mowing season. Sometimes there were three mowings which meant plenty of hay for the winter. Irrigation was done from wooden sluice boxes and flumes at that time.
Delia cooked on a large wood range with all the attachments. She was an excellent French cook and I remember the delicious biscuits and homemade bread that she made along with apple, berry, apricot and peach pies. Much canning was done in the summer to prepare for winter. I had to string a lot of beans and once was made to go without my supper when I peeled the potatoes too thickly. Delia was frugal and nothing was ever wasted. She canned in the old open kettle method and nobody in her family ever got food poisoning. She used the old style glass jars with rubber rings and glass lids that clamped down tightly. There was a cellar under the house where foods were stored, there was a smoke house where hams were hung, and a milk house where the cream was separated from the milk and put into large milk cans to be shipped out on the next train.
One day I was playing below the river bank when I looked down river and saw a herd of wild horses galloping toward me. I ran into a shallow cave and scared out a huge white owl who in turn scared me. I flattened myself against the dirt wall and fearfully watched the horses charge by. It wasn’t long when wild horses disappeared from the area.
I loved to go down to the river to play and look for artifacts and arrowheads. My grandfather had a fine collection and so did Mr. Fry, upriver. Before the dams, the river ran swiftly at Coyote Rapids and there was a lovely beach with sand and pebbles and beachcombing was a delightful pastime at low water. It is sad that with the coming of the dams up and down river the mighty Columbia was stilled in most areas. The free running river was exciting to see in all seasons.
When the big bands of sheep grazed through above the canal and then browsed on, I would pick the wool off the barbed fences and it would be sent in to the mills for spending money. Once, I found a little lamb that was left behind and brought it into the ranch to raise.
There were everlasting flowers that I liked to pick that grew in the sand dunes at the lower part of the ranch. They had masses of red papery flowers that grew on tall green stalks. I was told that it was the only place in the world that they grew? I wonder if they are still there. There was always a bunch in a jardinière in the ranch parlor.
In the winter when the Columbia River froze over, the men at Allard cut or sawed blocks of ice from the river that they hauled up the hill by horse and sled to the ice house where they packed them in sawdust that was saved from earlier efforts of cutting up driftwood. I remember the bats that flew all around my head as I climbed around in the dark of that place.
A change of pace for the people of Allard was to go to White Bluffs on a Saturday night and attend the theatre owned by Edmund Anderson. He entertained his patrons personally, ran the flicks, which of course were silent movies. He drove the first school bus, and had a large orchard on the turn as we approached the town, (But that is his son, Harry Anderson’s story to tell about that unusual family.) I always fell asleep on the way home from the theatre and hated to wake up, get out into the cold, have the dogs jump all over as I stumbled to the outhouse, have to wash up in cold water, and get into bed between cold sheets.
In the winter months when the pumping plant was closed down and we could no longer bathe in the canal, we all took a turn at scrubbing up in the kitchen in a galvanized tub. We heated buckets of water on the wood stove and cooled it off with cold water from the pump at the kitchen sink.
My father worked very hard on the ranch. He was a jack-of-all-trades, and took great pride in making any improvements on the place. I don’t believe that there was any real money made there, it was mostly a matter of preparing for survival at every season of the year and just liking to live along the Columbia River.
I attended school at the one room Vernita School house about 8 miles up river. Kathryn Syfford was the teacher one year and there were 12 or 13 of us in the school. They were Edna Lee, Marguerite Jaeger, Lester Welch (who stayed at the Allard’s for awhile), Edward Jaeger, Evelyn Richmond, my special little friend, Lenora Lee, Verna Chase, Mildred Chase, Charles Lee, Lillie Lee, Catherine Fry, who I heard later married a Shellby at Cold Creek toward Yakima, and Max Richmond, (Verna says she sent a picture enclosed of the school with all the named people when she sent this to the historical association.) We all had whooping cough one year except Marguerite Jaeger. It was in the winter, and I thought that we would never stop whooping.
The Vernita School in 1923-24 was a place for all the ranchers to gather. There were school programs that the parents would suffer through and I remember Sam Allard giving a speech or two. In one program I was dressed up like a little black girl. I remember saying something like this: “See, I’m a little pickaninny, look under my pink bonnet, and haven’t I a pretty dress with lots o’ posies on it!” Then, I became stage struck and forgot the rest of it.
At noon hour we’d sometimes take our lunch to the hills and play among the lava rocks and the wild flowers. If we stayed too long, the teacher rang the bell loudly and we would sheepishly dash back to the school house. I heard that the school house burned down in 1929 and that a new one was built a little farther up the line.
The Jaeger family at Vernita gave a moonlight swimming party at their place on the river one night for all the neighbors. A falling meteor lit up the sky and night turned into day for a few minutes and we stared at each other in shocked disbelief.
Once we took a ride to Priest Rapids to see Karl and Anna Becht and Karl Jr. On the way we passed the beautiful Knaub ranch with all its orchards. All that is left now are stumps that mark what was a productive showplace. As we progressed up the narrow mountain road above the river, we met a herd of privately owned buffalo lumbering toward us. We stopped the car and were eye to eye with their massive heads as we peered through the side curtains to watch them file by.
After my father left the river for awhile in 1924, Sam and Delia parted ways in 1926. They always argued in French, which I did not understand, so I really never knew what their problem was. Grandpa Allard released the ranch to Delia and she leased it out and came to California to be with us for a while.
In 1929, great grandpa Moses Allard who was 98 years old came from Minnesota to visit his son, Sam. He contracted pneumonia and died and was buried in White Bluffs. In 1943, the U.S. Government moved all the caskets to the cemetery in Prosser and put up a monument with all the names inscribed.
Sam Allard’s son, Henry, also ran the pumping plant at Allard for a while. He married Lucy Miller from Ellensburg, Washington in 1920. They had a son, Charles Samuel Allard, in 1921 in Pasco. They moved to the old company house just above the pumping plant. I remember Aunt Lucy making homemade noodles and draping them over a towel on the back of a kitchen chair to dry. She also impressed me with rose beads that she made from the many roses growing in the yard. (Picture of house enclosed) they left Allard in 1929 and moved to Joseph, Oregon where Uncle Henry ran a power plant for Pacific Power and Light Company for 30 years. There they reared two more children, Edna and Marilyn. Young Charles Sam went into the U.S, Air Force in World War II. Then he moved to Yakima where he has worked for the Bon Marche as service manager for 20 years. He and his wife, Daraline, reared 5 daughters. He retired in 1970 and sold real estate and taught classes in refrigeration at the Perry Institute in Yakima. I saw him for the first time in 50 years at the Richland Reunion in 1980. He died in a fire the following December. Uncle Henry Allard died in 1967 and was buried in Joseph, Or. Marilyn died, and Aunt Lucy passed away in June, 1980 at 82. She was buried in Joseph also. Edna Allard Mansfield is still in that area. She has three daughters, Janette, Joan and Jennifer, and two grandsons. She kept the old family home on Joseph Creek for a summer place, but lives in La Grande, Oregon at this time.
Grandpa Sam Allard must have been lonely after he and Delia parted ways. It wasn’t very long before he married Hortense, a lovely lady from Prosser. They lived for many years in a little house up hill from the pumping plant at Allard and I was told that they were very happy together in their old age.
My father went back to Allard in 1932. He planted a beautiful orchard, raised fields of corn and garden and worked himself thin. I remained in California and enrolled in Junior College. I visited my father in 1935. Childhood memories overwhelmed me and there were moments that I wished that I might live there again. Dad took me for a boat ride on the river and we saw a flock of geese on the water. Ducks liked to spend some time in the slow moving water in the canal and above the house and I heard them quacking away just like they did when I was a little girl and would sneak up and watch them in their funny antics.
I married John E. Thompson Jr. in Ventura, California in 1937. He had a career in the oil fields and we now live above the town on a hill with a view of the Pacific Ocean. We have reared four daughters and our life together is another story. In 1941 I boarded a train with my first two little girls and took them to see their grandfather Chase and also their great Grandfather Samuel Allard. War had been declared in Europe and I noticed that troops had boarded our train on the way to Washington – destination, probably the Aleutian Islands. Sam and Hortense were friendly with Delia and they visited back and forth and seemed content to be at the little spot that was Allard. The post office was taken away in the early thirties, so it wasn’t much of a place anymore. My little girls loved the farm like I did and had a wonderful time with the grandparents. I have pictures of them in the cornfield and riding the big mule about the place.
After I returned to Ventura in 1941 there was “Pearl Harbor” and in the spring my father wrote me that the area was being surveyed and that there was something strange going on in the valley. What followed is real history.
My father stayed on at Allard until 1943, when he and Delia and Grandpa Allard and Hortense received the “Black” letter from the government that all the people in the valley had to leave the area because of the “War Effort.”
The shock of being uprooted coupled with the dust and grime of a job at the project was too much for my father. He became ill, turned in his badge at the Hanford Project and went to Seattle where he spent a year in a sanitarium. He recovered and at 66 married his nurse! He eventually moved to Grants Pass, Oregon, where he died in 1967 when he was 81 year old.
Sam Allard and Hortense left Allard in the exodus and moved to Prosser. They attended the first reunion of the evacuees there in 1943. I was told that one morning in 1945 Hortense went shopping and when she returned to the house she found Sam dead on the floor where he had fallen after pouring himself a glass of wine. Hortense went to live with her niece, Mrs. John Miles (Louise) in Chula Vista, California and died there a few years later.
I attended my first White Bluffs and Hanford Pioneer reunion with my husband, John, in 1980 and was drawn back to the second one in 1981. John had never seen the valley. Karl Becht Jr., my cousin, and his wife Arline, from Hoodsport, Washington came to the reunion last year for the first time and celebrated Karl’s 50th White Bluffs High School Class Reunion. We toured the old home sites together. The shell of the old pumping plant at Allard is still standing and Coyote Rapids was still running free! I stood and looked toward where the old ranch house once stood down river, and in my mind’s eye I could see it all as it used to be. Now, nothing is left but the locust trees which alone had withstood the drought these last 39 years. Perhaps that is why the deer were in the area again. After the natural grasses are gone in the fall, the seed pods fall and make good fodder. On what was probably the upper part of the ranch stood a nuclear reactor overlooking the river. A lone coyote caught my attention walking through the sagebrush and I remembered how I feared them and the time that Lucy Allard’s father, Charles Miller, was bitten by a rabid coyote not too far from the spot. I watched it for a moment and then turned and walked back to the others.
Verna Helen Chase Thompson.
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