JAMES A. MOORE
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James A. Moore of the Seattle Investment Company, acquired some of Schunemann’s former holdings on the banks of the Columbia River, and he then had a showplace home, a mansion, built on the property in 1908, expecting to move into it with his wife. However, she became ill in their Seattle home and passed away before they were able to move into the mansion.
Moore had been interested in land around Pasco as early as 1905. A Spokane newspaper carried a story on October 24, 1905 that the Moore Investment Company of Seattle had a ditching outfit at work on his Pasco land, preparatory to putting about 1,000 acres under irrigation. He was having barns and other building constructed, including the above-mentioned mansion. Observers who passed the Moore farm while traveling to Hanford and White Bluffs on the river noted that a powerful gasoline engine was pumping water from the river to irrigate his orchards and other crops.
Moore sold part of his Pasco land to Thomas Carstens, member of a Tacoma meat packing family in 1911, and the rest of it was acquired by the Pasco Reclamation Company. For many years thereafter the “Big House on the Columbia,” as it was sometimes called, was known by many in this vicinity as the Carstens place.
A Pasco paper stated in 1912 that things at the Carstens ranch were “up and doing” up the Columbia. One hundred and sixty acres more land had been seeded to alfalfa and a herd of Holstein cattle had been ordered. The first carload of apples “grown and shipped” from Pasco was loaded out from the Carstens Ranch around October 1, 1912. Apples shipped from Pasco previously had been in lesser amounts, in less than carload lots.
