Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Eva Peterson
Last week, she got her driver’s license renewal notice in the mail.
On Feb. 11, she will turn 100 years old.
“I don’t think she’ll be renewing that,” said Darlene Perkins, the daughter of Eva Peterson of Garfield.
“The truth of that story is I have never gotten a ticket,” said Peterson. “Not even a citation.”
Peterson, who drove to limited places until recently, was born in Bismarck, ND, on the eve of World War I.
She grew up in Richland, only to be dislocated by the coming Hanford Project for World War II and later by the construction of McNary Dam on the Columbia River. Eventually, she and late husband John settled on 250 acres east of Garfield.
He died in 1979, and Eva lived in a mobile home in town until this past December, when she moved into LaDow Court in Garfield on New Year’s Eve.
For her 100th birthday a party will be held at Garfield Christian Fellowship Church with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren coming from Connecticut, Texas, California, Oregon and western Washington.
To mark her 90th, the family gathered on Peterson’s land on Ladow Butte for root beer floats and cookies.
When asked what her most memorable birthday was, she said, “It’s probably coming.”
Her memories span decades in Eastern Washing-ton, from farming alfalfa in what became the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, to killing rabbits during the Depression and learning to milk a cow in her 40s.
Once a widow, she spent more time as a volunteer in Garfield, driving her red 1991 Honda Civic to take ladies on trips to Pullman and Moscow who didn’t drive.
What’s it like to turn 100?
“I don’t feel any different than I did yesterday,” Peterson said.
She originally came west with her parents at age four to live in Anacortes, Wash., where her father worked in the shipyards.
Then he was given a tip.
“My dad heard about the new land at Richland that was just opening up, 25 dollars an acre.”
Pre-Hanford Richland
In 1919, the family moved east to a rented 10-acre tract of land in what is now West Richland. Later, Peterson’s father bought 10 acres which Eva, her sister and two brothers grew up on.
They soon had a horse.
“Dad bought it from the Indians,” Eva said, referring to Yakama Indians, who had trained the horse to be ridden bareback. So that’s how the kids rode it.
Eva graduated from Richland High School with 23 others in 1934.
It was well before the school became the Bombers.
“We didn’t have a mascot,” she said. “We just hollered for Richland.”
What about when they became the Bombers many years later?
“We didn’t like that one bit,” she said.
After graduation, Peterson went to work.
“I was gonna be a nurse. The doctor told me I was no good at that. I got as sick as my patients,” she said. “I had to find something else to do.”
So she got jobs in domestic work.
“I just went from one family to another,” Eva said.
During this time, Peterson was part of a group in which she helped make a float for a parade in Kennewick.
“Richland – the Backbone of Kennewick,” read the banner across it.
She can’t remember what the group was, but she does recall one of the men played piano on the float.
“Boy, he could make it talk,” she said.
In the mid-1930s, when Eva was in her early 20s, she left to spend three months in Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa visiting relatives. While there, she helped with cook shacks on wheat and corn harvests and sunflower growing.
Back in Richland, she met her husband John at a Grange dance.
“Everyone went to the Grange dances,” she said, including her parents.
“We were gonna get away from our parents as soon as we could,” Peterson said.
When she met John, she had already dated his brother.
John was a farmer, with a 10-acre plot with a cherry orchard, alfalfa, hay and 300 colonies of bees.
Two years after they were married in 1940, the government condemned the Petersons’ land.
“They only gave us two weeks to move,” Eva said. “We just got a letter in the mail.”
Meanwhile, John’s parents had 40 acres of land in what is now Columbia Park – which spans the banks of the river in Kennewick.
So John and Eva arranged to buy about half of it, where they farmed asparagus and raised turkeys and also tended a cherry orchard.
Then a flood came in 1948, during the construction of McNary Dam.
“They figured when they got that dam built, that area was gonna be underwater,” Eva said.
Moved out of another piece of land, John and Eva looked elsewhere, finding a spot east of Garfield.
“He was going to a place where the government wouldn’t want his land,” said Darlene with a laugh.
Moving to Garfield
So John and Eva came to Garfield in 1950 to farm the 250 acres. They brought the bees as well, and as a 1952 article in the Colfax Gazette-Commoner (which later became the Whitman County Gazette) reported, they produced four tons of honey that year.
Meanwhile, they also grew wheat and potatoes.
“Dad delivered gunny sacks of potatoes to WSU fraternities and sororities,” Darlene said.
He also traveled to Okanagan with the bees to pollenize apple and pear orchards.
John sold honey to the U.S. government as well. The beeswax was used to waterproof ammunition for the Korean War.
The traveling kept him away somewhat and he told Eva a change needed to be made.
“He wanted to sell the cow,” Eva said. “I said no. I learned to milk a cow when I was well along in years. I had a heck of a time balancing on the stool. It was a round piece of tree with a two-by-four sticking out of it.”
Another problem was the cow’s tail.
But she saw something in the Montgomery Ward catalog and ordered it.
“It was a device like a wishbone and it sits in the flanks of the cow so the tail won’t hit you in the face all the time,” she said.
The couple had three children by the time they left the Tri-Cities, with one more born in Garfield. All of the kids later graduated from Garfield High School.
While the children grew up, John and Eva acted as 4H leaders, taking on the project of cleaning up the Elberton Cemetery with their 55-member club in 1972.
In 1967, John and Eva moved to town, to the mobile home on the south hill of Garfield.
After John
She became a widow in 1979 and things changed.
“That’s it, that’s the end of married life,” said Eva, a longtime member of Garfield Christian Fellowship. “There was something else for me to do.”
She began driving ladies into Moscow and Pullman for shopping and other errands.
“There were so many women who didn’t drive or didn’t have a car,” she said. “When one of them died or something happened to them, there was room for one more.”
When LaDow Court Assisted Living opened in Garfield in 2004, Eva and a group of women brought over cake and dessert to celebrate birthdays once a month.
Head Cook Kathie Griner once asked Peterson why she did this.
“She said ‘I wanted to do something special for the old people,’” recalled Griner.
At the time, Peterson was in her 90s.
“A trait that my mother has, she never gives up on anything or anybody,” Darlene said, citing how her brothers have given her flowers over the years, which they invariably tell her to throw away after they’ve bloomed.
“She’s trying to keep it alive for the next year,” Darlene said. “This has happened for 25 years.”
“It’s a challenge,” said Eva. “I like the challenge. Sometimes they get pretty rugged before they come back.”
Her 100th party will be at the church on Sunday, Feb. 16, from 2 to 4 p.m.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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