Before the cows there were hops, and one of the growers who came through their crash helped start an insurance company

Ask anyone what the Enumclaw Plateau is for and the answer comes back in black and white: cows. This site has already told that story. But the cows were the second crop. Before the plateau made its living from milk, it grew hops, the bitter green cones that go into beer, and for about a decade it grew them the way people now buy lottery tickets.

The hop years explain a lot about the plateau. They may even help explain its insurance company, though nobody who founded it ever said so.

Sudden cash and lots of it

The Puget Sound hop business started in the Puyallup Valley in the 1860s, when Ezra Meeker's family planted cuttings from an Olympia brewer's garden and sold their first 180 pounds at 85 cents a pound. The timing turned out to be excellent. In 1882 most of the British crop failed, and Meeker sold 100,000 pounds at 70 cents. By 1890 Washington's harvest had reached 9 million pounds.

The fever climbed the White River onto the plateau just as the Northern Pacific did. King County's 2008 survey of the plateau's farm buildings describes an 1880s settlement boom driven by two things, the coming railroad and "the Pacific Northwest's Hops Boom," with forest cleared so fast that settlers remembered the plateau dotted with smoke. Numerous farms kept their few cows, their chicken coops and vegetable patches, and added commercial hop yards on top. The local history compiled by John and Doreen Anderson puts it simply: "Many of the farmers in the Enumclaw area discovered that growing hops brought in sudden cash and lots of it."

The money showed up across the plateau. At Krain, north of town, Mathias Malnerich, who had come from the Duchy of Krain in what is now Slovenia, bought 320 acres in 1881, drained a lake, and planted hay, vegetables and hops. At Coal Creek, later called Birch, Otto and Theodore Tamm sold vegetables to the miners and railroad crews, then added hops and cattle, and in the good years, the Andersons write, made a great deal of money. The county survey says Osceola, Krain, Veazie and Wabash all "profited greatly from the Hops Boom" and from farming generally, and built schools, churches and stores in those years. Much of the money, the Andersons write, was spent in the growing town of Enumclaw, where it encouraged more businesses to open.

There was a pleasing irony in it. The Andersons point out that plateau farm families were profiting from other people's drinking without ever pouring a glass: "Temperate folks had a way to enjoy the fruits of alcohol but were isolated from its evils."

Who picked

Hops yield well and pick badly. The cones ripen at the end of summer and, until machines took over in the 1940s, had to come off by hand. Meeker, the Puyallup Valley's biggest grower, wrote that the question every grower asked at harvest was "will enough come?"

Across the Puget Sound valleys the answer was mostly Indigenous families. HistoryLink's history of the pickers cites Meeker's count of 2,500 in the Puyallup Valley alone in 1882, names the Muckleshoot among the tribes who worked the harvest, and describes families paddling down from as far as Alaska over the course of months. In 1885 about 6,000 people came south from British Columbia, one in four of the Indigenous people then living in the province. A good picker could at times make as much as three dollars a day, and a season's pay could carry a family through the year. The Muckleshoot Reservation lies directly below the plateau on State Route 164, and the White River Valley Museum in Auburn keeps a Muckleshoot river canoe loaded "as though the family is packed up to go hop picking, c 1890."

The record for the plateau's own yards is thinner, and it is mostly local families. "Even women and kids could earn spending money and socialize at picking time," the Andersons write. At Krain, according to a 2011 Courier-Herald history of the community, "At one time, kids didn't start school until October so they could help in the hop fields." If a plateau ledger survives listing who else came up the hill to pick, it has not been published.

The louse and the panic

The hop aphid, the hop louse of the period accounts, breeds fast and feeds on the plant's sap; one photograph the Seattle Times described in 1999 shows 1,000 of them on a single leaf. One HistoryLink account dates its arrival on the plateau to 1890; the county survey says only "the 1890s," and the regional histories put the worst of it in 1891 and 1892. In 1892 it wiped out Meeker. "All my accumulations were swept away," he wrote.

The market went at the same time. European fields recovered from their own troubles, the world was glutted, and in 1893 the national Panic arrived. At the peak, the Times found, hops had brought as much as a dollar a pound. The Fall City grower George Davis Rutherford, the Seattle Times reported from his family's papers, "made only 11 cents a pound for one of his 1893 shipments to New York."

On the plateau the Andersons compress it into one sentence: "the bubble burst with an infestation of hop lice and collapsing prices in the worldwide Panic of 1893." A year later the Improvement Company of Enumclaw closed. "In the 1890s, Osceola farmers joined the hops boom until it crashed, and the Whites, among others, lost their farm," they write. Mrs. Edwin White had held some of the plateau's first school classes in her living room. At Flensted, where the Danes' hard times were compounded, the Andersons write, by the collapse of the hop market, Sarne Sorensen got through by making pottery, a trade he had learned in Denmark, and stamped each pot with the name of his hometown. The family still had to mortgage the farm.

The plateau switched to what it had been keeping on the side. A federal cooperative bulletin in 1948, looking back on the creamery's founding, said it in one line: "The farmers in this fertile valley of the foothills of the Cascades had turned from growing hops to dairying."

The lesson on file

Here is the part the dairy story usually skips. The Tamms came through the bust better than neighbors who had bet on hops alone, and the Andersons give the reason: "When bad times came, they did better than their peers who had not diversified." They had cattle as well as hops.

On February 17, 1898, less than five years after the crash, a group of plateau farmers filed articles of incorporation for Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. The founding vice president was Otto Tamm. The prime movers in the early years, HistoryLink says, were two Danes, the first president, George Bruhn, and the first agent, S. L. Sorenson; Tamm succeeded Bruhn as president and served until 1935. The Danes, the Andersons write, "supported each other in the hard times by developing cooperatives," and the creamery followed in 1899, the Rochdale store in 1905.

To be fair to the paperwork, nobody wrote hops into it. The company's purpose, as Oregon's examiners summarize it, was "insuring farm and village buildings and personal property against loss by fire and lightning," and by 1914, when a member burned out, the others were assessed to cover half the loss. But King County's historians, surveying the plateau's barns a century later, found a pattern that fits the Tamms' story: after the hops, it "appears to have been common" for farmers to produce a variety of goods "to insure against a disaster similar to that which the hops industry suffered." The plateau learned to spread its risk. Whether anyone at the 1898 meeting was thinking of hops, nobody wrote down; the Andersons trace the mutual instead to fire, which could erase a family's years of work in an hour, and to the Danish settlers' memory of cooperatives at home.

Farmers Mutual became Mutual of Enumclaw in 1966. It is still at 1460 Wells Street, and in 2023, according to Oregon's financial examiners, it wrote $403.5 million in premiums across seven states, including $54 million insuring farms. The dairy town got its cows from the hop crash. Its insurance company was founded in the hard years right after, and at least one of its founders was a hop grower who had come through because he had not bet everything on hops.

A kiln's second life

Hops had to be dried in kilns, large buildings that, the county survey says, typically had pyramid roofs. The same survey found that "no hop kilns remain today." Only one barn it recorded appeared to have been converted from one.

The most spectacular reuse came later. On December 27, 1923, three federal Prohibition agents drove from Seattle through Auburn to Cooper's Corner, midway to Enumclaw, turned up a side road to a ranch, and surrounded what the Seattle Daily Times called a former combination barn and hop kiln. It was, the paper reported, "from all outward aspects an old barn, but within constructed into five stories, including a lookout tower in the cupola." Inside were an 800-gallon still and 600 gallons of moonshine. The agents opened the valves and burned it. A building put up to dry the flavoring for beer ended its life making moonshine, and was burned by men enforcing a law against both.

In Krain, hops seem to have lasted longer than the histories say. The 2011 Courier-Herald history reports that "Prohibition also put an end to the area's busy hop industry." The paper trail for that has yet to be found. The pastures, and the insurance policies, are easier to locate.

For the cows that came next, read our history of the plateau's dairies.