| The City of East Wenatchee was incorporated in 1935, with an original town site of fifty acres.
Today the City’s incorporated boundaries have grown to 1,873 acres.
Native Americans were the earliest residents of the East Wenatchee area; the Richey Clovis Cache discovered in 1987 in a local orchard places humans in East Wenatchee 11,250 years ago.
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At the turn of the 20th Century, irrigation projects, including the Columbia Basin Project east of the region, opened the door for farming the barren land.
Orchards become the area’s leading industry. In 1907, the first bridge built across the Columbia River connecting East Wenatchee and Wenatchee supported vehicle traffic and an irrigation pipeline that carried water to the west side of the valley.
From its foundation in agriculture, the region’s economy has diversified to include year-round tourism and a variety of other industries.
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East Wenatchee’s Fancher Field was the landing site of the first non-stop Trans-Pacific flight. Pilots Clyde Pangborn, who was from the area, and Hugh Herndon began this historic leg of their round-the-world excursion in Misawa, Japan in early October.
Forty-one hours later, the small plane landed on Fancher Field, Pangborn’s home base.
A monument has been erected in Fancher Heights commemorating the historic event. A working replica of Pangborn and Herndon’s plane, the Miss Veedol, was constructed to commemorate the flight, and is on display at Pangborn Airport.
Linda Countryman, City Treasurer
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