Vancouver has one of the oldest set of weather records in the Pacific Northwest, with early observations beginning in 1849 at the Fort Vancouver Barracks. In the distant past I looked through those old log books, and remember that certain periods had incomplete weather records due to one uprising or another. Confrontations with local natives and travelers interrupted some days of record.
And you could see the quill pen and ink entries written meticulously upon the fragile, yellow, well-aged paper. There were periods of day after day of clouds and rain, with comments from the record-keeper of “depressing” and similar descriptions of the long, dark, wet winters at the Fort.
Weather observations were also taken by volunteer A.A. Quarnberg, a pioneer horticulturalist who was largely responsible for the wide fame of Clark County’s filbert and prune crops in the 1920s and 1930s. He eventually became the “official” weather observer for Vancouver and established a weather station about 1½ miles west-northwest of the barracks in 1895.
In 1933 he turned his unpaid weather-observing duties over to his son-in-law, C.J. Moss, who faithfully continued the daily observations until July 1966. The baton was turned over to the WSU agricultural station at 1919 N.E. 78th St. in Hazel Dell.
