Almira, WA

Almira is a small Lincoln County town on the wheat country of central Washington, founded where the Central Washington Railroad crossed a high stretch of open farmland. Charles C. Davis arrived in the 1880s, opened a store, and established a post office in 1889. The first name was Davisine, but when land developers platted the town, they noticed his wife's given name on the deed and suggested Almira. The railroad brought settlers through advertisements promising fertile land and water, and Almira briefly became a terminus with ambitions of being the commercial center for miles around.

The line continued west to Coulee City in 1890, taking some of the boom's urgency with it, but Almira held on as a farm town. Its history still lives in the rail grade, the original store-and-post-office story, and the broad wheat fields around the town. The school system once included seventeen rural one-room schools before students and services consolidated. Almira is a Washington wheat-country town with a name borrowed from a homesteader's wife, a railroad beginning, and a stubborn little town center that outlasted the first boom.