Then and Now: Morrison Bros. Seed Company helped feed allies in WWII

The corner of Sprague Avenue and Park Road was home to early tire factories until the 1920s, then was followed by a business combining war and peas.

Washington Tire and Rubber started up in 1918 believing that Spokane could challenge Akron, Ohio, as a home of tire manufacturing. Although the factory did open, the property was foreclosed on around 1920.

A new company, Jack Tire & Rubber, took over in 1922 and lasted until 1926.

Then came the Morrison Bros. Seed Company.

E.H Morrison, a pioneer of Fairfield, Washington, was born in 1848, grew up in Connecticut and New York and studied engineering in Europe. He worked around the country before coming to the Northwest in 1878. He moved to Fairfield in 1891 and started his own farm, which grew to 1500 acres. He was friends with Chicago merchant Marshall Field and other well-known business partners. Morrison died in 1914 and his sons, Norton and Edward, founded Morrison Bros. Seed in 1926.

The pea operation took over the old tire factory along the railroad tracks at Sprague and Park for storing and processing peas.

In 1930, the Morrison company’s E.H. Hughes told The Spokesman-Review that the company had taken in hundreds of car loads of sacked peas and it had 50 employees, mostly women, who picked through them to cull the undersized and discolored ones.

The Morrisons’ business exploded in the 1940s with the start of the war Europe. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act of 1941 immediately sent war matériel, oil and food to Britain, France, the Soviet Union and other countries with the promise of payment later. Along with weapons, vehicles and fuel oil, the government sent thousands of tons of flour, dried peas, beans, sugar, canned meats, butter, vegetable shortening, margarine and more.

Peas, both dried and canned, could survive long shipping voyages.

By 1942, according to Time Magazine, the Department of Agriculture was buying $5 million of food each day. The Spokesman-Review wrote that the program turned pea farming from “a normal crop business into a gold rush.”

Edward Morrison died in 1944 and Norton Morrison died in 1952.

Morrison Bros. Seed was sold to Asgrow Seed of Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1983.