It was an important point for rail shipments of fruit and was named by Northern Pacific officials for William Perry Sawyer, from whom they acquired a local right-of-way. For a time the place was called Sawyer Station. In 1919 Mr. Sawyer was described as “… one of the most prominent men in the Yakima Valley, an active champion of the good roads movement, of educational interests and of all things affecting public welfare.”
Sawyer
Points of Interest 
Matton Cabin
one of the earliest types of cabin. The little two-room house is built of peeled cotton-wood logs, chinked with white clay. In 1884, the year he was appointed farm instructor for the Indians at Fort Simcoe, J. P. Mattoon built the cabin, one of the first in the valley.
W.P. Sawyer House and Orchard
The house is a Colonial Revival style mansion located in the lower Yakima Valley at Parker Bottom. Completed in 1910, the lavish farm house was the central structure on Elmwood Farm, one of the area’s earliest fruit ranches. To the rear and sides of the house are Bartlett pear orchards which were planted by Sawyer and are still in production. The mansion and carriage house are the sole surviving structures of the farm and its enterprising owner. Businessman, transportation promoter, horticulturist, and state legislator, Sawyer was a true Renaissance man of the developing West. Adjacent to the present-day mansion is reputedly one of the earliest sites of the St. Joseph’s Mission complex, a series of Oblate stations founded amongst the Yakima Indians in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
Points of Interest
Matton Cabin
one of the earliest types of cabin. The little two-room house is built of peeled cotton-wood logs, chinked with white clay. In 1884, the year he was appointed farm instructor for the Indians at Fort Simcoe, J. P. Mattoon built the cabin, one of the first in the valley.
W.P. Sawyer House and Orchard
The house is a Colonial Revival style mansion located in the lower Yakima Valley at Parker Bottom. Completed in 1910, the lavish farm house was the central structure on Elmwood Farm, one of the area’s earliest fruit ranches. To the rear and sides of the house are Bartlett pear orchards which were planted by Sawyer and are still in production. The mansion and carriage house are the sole surviving structures of the farm and its enterprising owner. Businessman, transportation promoter, horticulturist, and state legislator, Sawyer was a true Renaissance man of the developing West. Adjacent to the present-day mansion is reputedly one of the earliest sites of the St. Joseph’s Mission complex, a series of Oblate stations founded amongst the Yakima Indians in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
