The Crewport Farm Labor Camp: A Short History

By Mario C. Compean

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The Crewport History Project is an oral history

endeavor that seeks to reconstruct the history of the Crewport Farm Labor Camp, which is now an unincorporated community located two miles north of Granger, Washington, in the central region of the Yakima Valley. The Project has collected some thirty interviews with former Camp residents to date (June, 2001).

The Crewport Farm Labor Camp existed as a migrant labor camp from May, 1941 to December,1968. Its roots are in the Great Depression and drought that hit the Plains states during the 1930's and continued on through the latter part of the decade. The severe drought and strong winds whipped up dust storms during 1933 and 1934, that were partially responsible for the fatally damaging erosion of the farm lands. As a result, many families lost their farms and were forced to migrate west to start their lives anew. The states affected by the storms became popularly known as the Dust Bowl, and the farm families that fled them came to be called Dust Bowl migrants or drought refugees.

The Crewport Farm Labor Camp opened its doors to house migrant farm laborers and their families for the first time in May, 1941. The Camp was built by the federal government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) to house migrant farm laborers who were uprooted by the dust storms. Initially the camp was known as the Granger Labor Camp, because of its location just two miles north of the City of Granger, Washington. When it first opened only families from the Plains states were housed at the Camp. By the mid_1940's Mexican American migrant farm workers from the Southwest, mostly from Texas, were also given shelter at Crewport. In the early 1940s the Mexican Americans and dust Bowl migrants were recruited to the Yakima Valley because of the farm labor shortage caused by World War II.

The Mexican American families, many of them from the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, made a significant contribution in filling the labor demands of the farm and orchard harvests in the Yakima Valley. These families were housed at Crewport, including some who stopped migrating from and back to Texas and settled permanently at the Camp. Change continued through the latter 1940's and 1950's. Eventually, most of the drought refugee families relocated elsewhere in the Valley or in other regions of the state, and by the early 1950's on through its closing, most of the families living at the Crewport Farm Labor Camp were Mexican American. Many of these Mexican American families settled in Granger when the Camp was closed in 1968. The Crewport Farm Labor Camp closed at the end of 1968, partly as a result of the social ferment caused by the social movements of the times. By then the condition of the Camp shelters had eteriorated badly, and pressure by farm labor advocates demanded their improvement. In response the Washington

State Health Board issued new housing code requirements that caused Yakima
County, who was now the Camp's owner, to order it closed. County authorities
argued that the new housing code made it too costly to renovate the shelters.
Consequently, the Camp was closed and sold to a private investor who, in
turn, sold the shelters and houses one by one to individual families. Population
changes at Crewport that began in the mid 1940's continued through the 1960's
and 1970's. By the latter 1960's and early 1970's, new arrivals at Crewport now came mostly from Mexico. Mexican immigrants thus comprise the majority of the current Crewport community.