Clark County History: Works Progress Administration

The Works Progress Administration, established in 1935, left behind roads, bridges, public buildings, parks and other structures. Some of them remain today. Most Clark County residents don’t realize some of the places they pass now came about through New Deal funding.

According to the website Living New Deal, Clark County received Works Progress Administration funds of $42,262 for Leverich Park, mainly to improve Kiggins Bowl; $37,631 for the Vancouver Barracks; $129,584 for street improvements; and $174,763 for the city’s water system. The Works Progress Administration also granted $102,000, or about 80 percent of the funds for constructing Lewisville Park. (WPA projects in Clark County would total about $10 million today.)

Once there was a town called Lewisville along the East Fork of the Lewis River that First Nations called the Cathlapotle. Lost to history is how involved Lee Lewis, a local surveyor in 1856, was in Lewis River’s rechristening. Crossing the river was difficult, and settlers stocked up on food and supplies for the winter. Eventually, they built a wooden structure townsfolk called Hall’s Bridge to make provisioning easier. In 1883, a flood washed out the bridge. Although the town had a post office and a store, it slowly wore away. Clark County bought the remains in 1936, shortly before the rebuilding of the park.

County workers constructed the park buildings by peeling logs, hand-splitting shakes and using lots of stone masonry to keep the park’s natural appearance. As a result, Lewisville Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and named to the Clark County Heritage Register in 1987. The application for the park’s addition to the register states that by June 1937, this and other Works Progress Administration projects in the county had put 800 to work. It also indicated that 16.5 percent of the county’s population was getting federal relief by the next summer, primarily from the work projects.

The Works Progress Administration also hired writers. Many of these writers worked on guidebooks for every state. Four received Pulitzer Prizes for other works — Conrad Aiken (1930), John Cheever (1979), Eudora Welty (1973), and Studs Terkel (1995) — and one received the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow (1976). The guidebook for Washington contains brief sketches of Clark County history. It quotes the 1850 census showing that year Vancouver had 95 houses, and reveals the first commercial building opened July 4,1854 (Peter Fulkerson’s saloon and bowling alley).

And it dishes up Vancouver’s most embarrassing moment — how the city was named the territorial capital in 1859, only to lose the designation the next year to Olympia by more than 600 votes. It humorously relates that the local men recruited for the Spanish-American War formed Company G, nicknamed the Prune-Picked Platoon.

Despite putting hundreds of Clark County residents and millions of other Americans back to work to improve their communities, the New Deal was never contagiously popular. Citizens’ opinions on the WPA split in a 1939 Gallup poll, in which 28 percent of respondents named it a great accomplishment and 23 percent called it the worst. Yet, today, Clark County continues enjoying the benefits of the WPA effort.

Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.