ALVIN PARKER GRAY
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Alvin Parker Gray, no relation to Captain William P. Gray, along with his brother W.B. Gray and Robert Gerry came to Pasco by way of San Francisco, built one of the first homes in Pasco, and operated the first general store, beginning in the early 1880’s. Born in Ellsworth, Maine on March 14, 1853, he and his brother went to San Francisco in 1876 and stayed two years before returning to Maine. He came to Pasco in 1882, in the meantime having married Miss Melvina O’Neill, a Pierce County, Washington, native, who came to Pasco with him.
Upon seeing the dry, treeless desert she turned to her husband and remarked, “Alvin, I’ve seen enough. You take me right out of here.” His reply was that they would try it for a while, but the “while” became a stay of nearly 70 years by the time she passed away in June, 1953.
When Gray and his brother first arrived here they engaged in the business of supplying logs to the Northern Pacific to be sawed into lumber and bridge timbers for their railroad construction work out of Ainsworth and Pasco. The logs were procured at the headwaters of the Yakima River in the Cascade Mountains and then floated down river to the sawmill at Ainsworth.
Gray and Gerry built their first store east of the tracks in Pasco. A little later they built on the present site of the Cunningham Hotel, but that store burned down, and they immediately rebuilt at that same location. In 1908 they built near Forth and Lewis Streets, where Mr. and Mrs. Gray operated a mercantile business until 1925, when they sold out and retired from business.
The Grays claimed the distinction of having the first telephone in Pasco, in their store building. They were very prominent in helping to start trees in what is now Sacajawea Park in 1925.
Mayor and Mrs. A.P. Gray received invitations to visit France as guests of the French Government in return for the hospitality paid to two famous French aviators, Dieudonne Costes and Maurice Bellonte when they were forced to make an unscheduled landing at the Pasco airport. The WALLA WALLA DAILY BULLETIN carried the following story about the French trans-Atlantic flyers:
“When fog near Portland, Oregon, forced the French transatlantic fliers Dieudonne Costes and Maurice Bellonte in their plaine ‘Question Mark,’ down at the Pasco airport and gave to Pasco the unusual honor of being the only city in the Pacific Northwest to entertain them, it was little thought that Pasco would again be the recipient of another honor through their unplanned visit.
“This time it comes through an invitation to Mayor and Mrs. A.P. Gray to be the guests of the French government… on the occasion of the opening day of the International Colonial and Oversears Possession Exhibition in Paris in June… The mayors of all cities in the United States who were hosts to the fliers on their goodwill tour of the country, number 37, received invitations.”
The group of mayors and their wives sailed from New York on the “Ile de France” on May 15 for their three-week stay in France. Mrs. Gray, representing the Daughters of the Pioneers at the opening of the Paris exposition, carried a gift to be placed in the United States exhibit at the exposition, a full-scale reproduction of the Mount Vernon home of George Washington, for which the U.S. government had appropriated $250,000. A.P. Gray had been a prominent citizen of Pasco since before the turn of the century. In 1926 he was elected mayor, and was serving his third successive term when he passed away in November 1931, at age 78 being the oldest living mayor in the United States at that time. This was only about six months after his return from France. A copy of the land patent issued by the General Land Office of the Untied States, and signed by then President Benjamin Harrison on October 8, 1892, is evidence that Alvin P. Gray homesteaded 160 acres of land on a site that is now a part of Pasco. A daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gray, Josephine Gray Glenn Nutley now resides in Port Angeles.
