This day in history: Farmers market opened in Riverfront Park. New city wells showed Spokane aquifer’s purity and abundance
From 1976: The Earthlife Festival and Farmers Market made its summer debut in Riverfront Park,
The festival was intended as a throwback to the successful Folklife Festival area of Expo ’74, and it featured folk music, crafts and an extensive farmer’s market.
The fresh produce and fruit proved to be the biggest attraction, with some of the farmers and orchardists selling out before the day was over.
Business was not quite as brisk at the craft stalls. Most of the crafters were “busier handing out business cards than ringing up sales.”
Organizer George Lathrop said he was a little disappointed in the turnout, but attendance was expected to improve when word got out. This was the second year for the festival.
From 1926: The Spokesman-Review ran a feature about Spokane’s “unexcelled water supply,” and pronounced it “marvelously pure and absolutely free of bacterial life of any kind.”
The city’s superintendent of the water division said that “nowhere in the world will you find a city favored with such a wonderful supply of water.
“Citizens are apt to take a good water supply for granted without any thought of the discomfort and possible suffering and ill-health that may be the lot of those in other cities not so well situated.
The superintendent said the city’s water comes from “a deep subterranean river at a temperature of 48 degrees.”
“That river is a puzzle to engineers, geologists and hydraulics experts,” the newspaper said. “They do not know where it comes from, where it goes or how it got where it is. It apparently flows under the entire Spokane Valley as far as Coeur d’Alene.”
Today, we know a bit more about what we know as the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer.
The city had just installed two new wells, increasing the city’s pumping capacity from 80 million gallons a day to nearly 150 million gallons. The pumps in one of the new wells recently pumped 44 million gallons in 24 hours, decreasing the water level in the well by 2½ feet. But almost as soon as the pumps were turned off, the level rose to the normal level.