The public, generally, gave me the credit of introducing hop culture into the Northwest. Therefore it seems fitting to tell here the story of the beginnings of an industry that came to have great importance.
In March of 1865, Charles Wood of Olympia sent about three pecks of hop roots to Steilacoom for my father, Jacob R. Meeker, who then lived on his claim in the Puyallup valley. John V. Meeker, my brother, passed by my cabin when he carried the sack of roots on his back from Steilacoom to my father's home, a distance of about twenty miles, and from the sack I took roots enough to plant six hills of hops. As far as I know those were the first hops planted in the Puyallup valley. My father planted the remainder, and in the following September harvested the equivalent of one bale of hops, 180 pounds. This was sold for eighty-five cents a pound, or a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars for the bale.
This sum was more money than had been received by any of the settlers in the Puyallup valley, except perhaps two, from the products of their farms for that year. My father's near neighbors obtained a barrel of hop roots from California the next year, and planted them the following spring—four acres. I obtained what roots I could get that year, but not enough to plant an acre. The following year (1867) I planted four acres, and for twenty-six successive years thereafter we added to the area planted, until our holdings reached past the five-hundred-acre mark and our production was more than four hundred tons a year.
None of us knew anything about the hop business, and it was entirely by accident that we engaged in it. But seeing that there were possibilities of great gain, I took pains to study hop culture, and found that by allowing our hops to mature thoroughly, curing them at a low temperature, and baling them while hot, we could produce hops that would compete with any product in the world. Others of my neighbors planted them, and so did many people in Oregon, until soon there came to be a field for purchasing and shipping hops. But the fluctuations in price were so great that in a few years many growers became discouraged and lost their holdings.
The site of the cabin home in Puyallup is now Pioneer Park, Ezra Meeker's gift to the city that he founded. In it still stands the ivy vine that for fifty years grew over the cabin.
Finally, during the failure of the world's hop crop in the year 1882, there came to be unheard-of prices for hops, and fully one third of the crop of the Puyallup valley was sold for a dollar a pound. I had that year nearly one hundred thousand pounds, which brought an average of seventy cents a pound.
My first hop house was built in 1868—a log house. It still stands in Pioneer Park in Puyallup. We frequently employed more than a thousand people during harvest time. Many of these were Indians, some of whom would come for a thousand miles down the coast from British Columbia and even the confines of Alaska; they came in the great cedar-log canoes manned with twenty paddlers or more. For the most part I managed my Indian workers very easily. Once I had to tie up two of them to a tree for getting drunk; their friends came and stole away the prisoners—which was what I intended they should do.
It was in 1870, eighteen years after my arrival from across the Plains, that I made my first return journey to the States. I had to go through the mud to the Columbia River, then out over the bar to the Pacific Ocean, and down to San Francisco. Then there was the seven days' journey over the Central and Union Pacific and connecting lines; this meant sitting bolt upright all the way, for there were no sleeping cars then, and no diners either.
About 1882 I had come to realize that the important market for hops was in England, and E. Meeker & Co. began sending trial shipments, first seven bales, then the following year five hundred bales, then fifteen hundred. Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars—said at that time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the United States. At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on their way to London. I spent four winters in London dealing in the hop market.