Charles Francis Adams Jr. was the grandson of President John Q. Adams and the Great Grandson of our second president, John Adams. In 1887, Charles Adams Jr. was the president of Union Pacific Railroad. He got to know Idaho well in that role and once said, “I regard Idaho as the most promising field of development.”
He put his money behind that statement in 1896, when he and other investors started the Lewiston Water & Power Company. Those same entrepreneurs developed property just across the Snake River in Washington State into something called Vineland. Vines soon grew there as vineyard began to produce grapes. Family farms and orchards soon came along. The company platted a town close by, calling it Concord after the city in Massachusetts where Adams had property.
But it was Adams himself that proposed changing the community’s name to Clarkston, seeing the symmetry in honoring the leaders from the Corps of Discovery with towns named for them on each side of the river. Adams joined the communities by building the first bridge between them across the Snake.
Adams was a towering figure in the two towns. His sons, Henry and John, moved to Lewiston in 1899. On 450 acres their father had purchased, they built a large home with a private polo field and views of the Snake River. John didn’t stay long in Lewiston, but Henry lived there for years overlooking his family’s business interests, which included the Adams building on Main Street.
My source for this story is a book I highly recommend, Inventing Idaho, by Keith C. Peterson. It was published by Washington State University Press in 2022.
He put his money behind that statement in 1896, when he and other investors started the Lewiston Water & Power Company. Those same entrepreneurs developed property just across the Snake River in Washington State into something called Vineland. Vines soon grew there as vineyard began to produce grapes. Family farms and orchards soon came along. The company platted a town close by, calling it Concord after the city in Massachusetts where Adams had property.
But it was Adams himself that proposed changing the community’s name to Clarkston, seeing the symmetry in honoring the leaders from the Corps of Discovery with towns named for them on each side of the river. Adams joined the communities by building the first bridge between them across the Snake.
Adams was a towering figure in the two towns. His sons, Henry and John, moved to Lewiston in 1899. On 450 acres their father had purchased, they built a large home with a private polo field and views of the Snake River. John didn’t stay long in Lewiston, but Henry lived there for years overlooking his family’s business interests, which included the Adams building on Main Street.
My source for this story is a book I highly recommend, Inventing Idaho, by Keith C. Peterson. It was published by Washington State University Press in 2022.
Captain Charles Francis Adams Jr (in the rocking chair) with officers of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, August 1864. He would later become the head of Union Pacific Railroad and spark developments in Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington.
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