The town, situated on a low, wide plain, was a bustling center of the surrounding farming, dairying, and poultry community in the 1940s, and had a vegetable cannery and a receiving, shipping, and feed station of the Washington Co-op Egg and Poultry Association. A large bulb farm near the town once cultivated and harvested daffodil, tulip, narcissus, and iris bulbs for shipment to eastern and foreign markets.
A large percentage of the local population were of Finnish descent, and traces of the old-world culture arid speech remained discernible through the 1940s. The first Finnish settlers came here in 1901.
