Pioneer, Mother, Hops Seller, Historian

We are moving ever closer to the Kalama Harbor Lodge grand opening on April 20! And so, here’s another Kalama story for you, this one about Eliza Jane Meeker. Her story is often added as an after-thought to her husband’s tale, but she was an exceptional woman in her own right. Read on…

She may be lesser known by history books than her husband, renowned pioneer Ezra Meeker, but Eliza Meeker was no less of an adventurer. From humble beginnings, she would travel across the country and eventually across the world where she met with royalty. In between, there was a very difficult year when she lived at what is now Kalama, isolated from other settlers and alone for much of the time, caring for their log-cabin home and their young child. Armed with courage and an industrious spirit, Eliza proved time and again that she was up for any challenge.

The Meeker adventure almost didn’t happen. After marrying in 1850 and starting their family soon after, Eliza, Ezra and their infant son originally set out to travel 500 miles, from their parents’ homes in Indianapolis to the great plains of Iowa. Following their arrival, they found themselves both disheartened by Iowa’s frigid winters and increasingly captivated by stories coming back from Oregon Country – abundant natural resources, mild weather and the promise of 320 acres of free land courtesy of the U.S. government.

And so in the spring of 1852, after just a single winter in Iowa, the Meekers and their 7-month-old child joined the steady stream of settlers heading west.

The journey was long, dangerous and difficult. Ezra would later state unequivocally that Eliza’s exceptional planning and culinary skills proved the deciding factor in making the trip a successful one. Along the arduous five-month Oregon Trail crossing, her shortcakes, puddings, pies and buttermilk shored up morale as well as constitutions.

Even so, the Meekers arrived in Oregon like so many others, exhausted, and in Eliza’s case, quite ill. Though they found Portland to be a “sorry place of stumps and logs and mud,” Eliza’s health would keep them in place for a few unsettled months before heading north into what soon would be carved off as Washington Territory.

The Meekers chose an attractive home site on the banks of the Columbia River, a couple miles south of the Kalama River. Here they filed a Donation Land Claim (the first ever at Kalama proper) and built a small log cabin. Ezra was soon drawn away with his brother, Oliver, to explore the burgeoning settlement and money-making opportunities around Puget Sound. Eliza was left alone with their infant son, her closest neighbors no less than four miles away and communication almost nonexistent, coming only rarely from those navigating the river. Such long absences in which Eliza fared for herself and their growing number of children would continue throughout the couple’s 50-year marriage, because of Ezra’s draw to the potential of new horizons for business and adventure.

The next year, in 1853, the Meekers uprooted again, to make the move to the Sound. They sold the Kalama land claim with cabin to their former Indiana neighbor (and fellow Oregon Trail mate) John Davenport.

Eliza, Ezra and their four children moved one more time in 1862, this time to the Puyallup Valley where they began their newest adventure – growing hops to make beer. The business was so fruitful that the couple would eventually spend four months out of each year in London, selling hops on the world market. It was there in 1885 that Eliza Meeker was presented to Queen Victoria – in a dress made by a local Puyallup seamstress!

In 1892, a pestilence outbreak would put the Meekers out of the hops business for good, but not before Eliza hired Tacoma architects Ferrell and Darmer to build a 17-room Victorian mansion in Puyallup, a beautiful home that stands today.

Over the next 50 years, Eliza Meeker and her family continued to live and work as merchants in the Puget Sound region, passionately maintaining and preserving the history of the Oregon Trail, and their hard-earned rise in good fortune from Kalama to the Puget Sound.