Little Town, Big Bash Lacrosse Observes Centennial In Style Befitting Bigger Place

The real centennial of this Palouse farm town was at least four years ago. But townsfolk didn’t have time to pull off a celebration then, so they picked this year, a century after the town was renamed from Dunlor to LaCrosse.

“Let’s pick a date - what difference does it make?” is how Tedd Nealey, head of the centennial celebration, put it.

There’s a lot that seems arbitrary about this town, from its original reason to exist to the reasons for its continued existence. Formed as a way station in a countryside once loaded with train stops, it’s now yet another remote farm town hanging on in the face of big-city distractions and brutal rural economics.

In spite of that, a core group of the town’s 300 or so residents has thrown itself into organizing a bash befitting a town of far greater size.

It starts in earnest tonight with a spaghetti feed at 4, a game of lacrosse (get it?) at 7 and the obligatory live dancing at the local tavern. Vintage photos are being shown in the LaCrosse Market. The high school gym is festooned with historical displays.

Saturday will bring a biplane flyover, a parade featuring U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt, a pit barbecue and a special stamp cancellation at the post office. A new gazebo will be broken in by Wylie Gustafson - a Nashville performer who married a local gal - and his Wild West Show.

Beryl Krafczyk has spearheaded an effort to contact every LaCrosse High School graduate for an all-class reunion.

“I bought 2,000 name tags,” she said. “Does that tell you what I’m thinking?”

The town’s birth might be pinned to 1888, when the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company connected a line here with the Northern Pacific and built a depot, section house and water house. A railroad engineer named the depot LaCrosse, after his hometown in Wisconsin, but when the post office arrived in 1892, it was named Dunlor after George Taylor, the depot agent, and Joe Dunphy, a railroad engineer.

The full town adopted the name LaCrosse four years later.

In the following decades, the town was about as prosperous as any in the Palouse country. It managed to quickly rebuild from a 1914 fire and by 1917 had more than 50 businesses.

With the dawn of farm mechanization and fewer field hands, the town’s population peaked at 670 in the early ‘20s. But with the help of the local Commercial Club, a civic organization, it continued to be what some people still call the center of southwest Whitman County.

At one point, club members threatened to split from Whitman County when commissioners refused to pay for an approach on a bridge crossing the Palouse River.

The town still has occasional disputes with the county seat over feelings that a disproportionate amount of tax dollars goes to the larger population centers like Colfax and Pullman.

Not that the town’s contribution to society at large amounts to a sneeze. It sent three legislators - all Republicans - to Olympia this century. It counts among its greats Laverne “Torgy” Torgeson, former NFL linebacker and winner of three Super Bowl rings as a coach for the Washington Redskins.

The high school this year is graduating only 10 students - down from a peak of 37 in 1940 - but three of them are “tri-valedictorians” with 3.99 grade-point averages. More than half the graduates eventually earn college degrees.

For all it has to offer, the town is struggling to hang on. The only cafe closed a few months ago, leaving about a dozen local businesses. And as rich as the Palouse soil is, farmers here contend with so little rainfall that the crop often turns blue for lack of moisture. Many farmers rushed to join the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which pays them to idle land prone to erosion.

That hurt local businesses even more, said Dallas Filan, a City Council member.

“Unless we discover oil, gold or diamonds,” he said, “I think LaCrosse is going to be just holding its own.”

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