Walter Strickland Thornber Papers and Photographs, 1900-1915

Walter Strickland Thornber (1874-1959) was born in Illinois and received both his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from South Dakota Agricultural College (today’s South Dakota State University) by 1899 and served on the faculty there until 1904. Special studies at Cornell University followed and resulted in a Master of Science degree in Agriculture. In 1900 Thornber married Phoebe Hough, who died two years later. With his second wife Ethelyn Henry, Thornber had two sons, Gordon and Merrill, and two daughters Evelyn and Georgeann. In spring 1905, Thornber accepted an appointment as Professor of Horticulture at Washington State College and horticulturist for the Washington Agricultural Experiment Station (WAES) at the college.

As horticulturist with WAES, Thornber continued the farmers’ institutes and demonstration trains begun by predecessors and wrote WAES bulletins such as 1910’s “Cherries in Washington.” Glass-plate negatives in this collection furnished some of the prints in Thornber’s bulletins. Thornber also conducted research on fruit varieties suitable for local conditions in an already established experimental orchard.

Thornber served as horticulture faculty and department head at WSC and horticulturalist with WAES until the summer of 1911 when he resigned to become a consulting horticulturist in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley. There, in the first two decades of the century, the Lewiston-Clarkston Improvement Company (LCIC) and the Lewiston Land and Water Company (LLWC), secured water and land rights in order to irrigate and then sell orchard plots to those who “come here for a common purpose, that of making homes in an orchard community for congenial conditions.”

These companies had solicited Thornber’s advice before he moved from Pullman to the valley, but by 1911 they convinced him to move south where he could work more directly with each company to plan the orchard plots and offer short courses about fruit choices and care under the auspices of the Lewiston-Clarkston School of Horticulture, of which Thornber was made the director. Thornber lectured daily on orchard management, combatting pests, and other topics of interest to budding valley orchardists. LLWC planned to devote about six thousand of its thirty thousand or so acres in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley to experimental orchards and vineyards which would also be used for laboratory instruction on pruning, spraying, grafting, and so on.

National and state support for agricultural extension work coincided with the diminishment of Thornber’s consulting work and brought him back to Pullman in 1915. The State of Washington had provided funding for agricultural extension work at the experiment station in Pullman and by 1911 the college’s Board of Regents separated the agricultural extension work from the experiment station. With that division, came the need to hire specialists within the Agricultural Extension Service. In 1914 the federal government responded to the demand for more extension work with the Smith-Lever Act that granted money to each land-grant school for agricultural extension work. This attention to the importance of extension work drew Thornber back to Pullman and Washington State College in 1915 as the Director of Agricultural Extension.

Thornber worked at WSC from 1905 until 1911 when he left to work as the Horticulturist for the Leswiston-Clarkston School of Horticulture. He returned to Pullman in 1915 as the director of the Washington Agricultural and Home Economics Extension Service. He again left in 1919 to return to Lewiston to become a full-time fruit grower. Walter S. Thornber died of a stroke April 1, 1959 in his home in Lewiston, Idaho.