(Tribune News Service) — Most people today think of the area now encompassed by the Yakima Training Center as a place where U.S. military units and their allies do live-fire combat practice.

But more than 100 years ago, the area in and near the sprawling garrison was home to nearly 50 Black homesteaders.

Going back as far as 1914, Black families established homesteads in or near what is now the training center, with the last of them losing their land in the 1950s as the training center grew. Archaeological digs on the training center found signs of some of the homes and wells the early settlers dug.

Some of the homesteaders came to Washington from the east to work in the coal mines of western Kittitas County, brought in as strikebreakers, before eventually coming to the Yakima Valley and obtaining homesteads.

Others were attracted by the prospects of a better life on their own land.

But homesteading could be difficult, due to drought conditions in the area.

One homesteader, Clarence Alexander, received a patent for a homestead near Washout Gulch, along the south side of the Yakima Ridge near Moxee in 1917 — eight years after first settling there. He tried raising broomcorn, potatoes, beans, onions and alfalfa, but drought, intense heat and rabbits cut into his harvest.

He eventually worked in Yakima to support his family, riding a bike on the 18-mile round trip commute.

Another homesteader was Amos Spearman, who came to Washington to work at the Pacific Exposition, later moving his family to Yakima, and establishing a homestead on what is now the training center land near the Columbia River, in addition to a farm in the Naches area.

Spearman’s descendants include Ted Spearman, the first Black attorney in Yakima and a Superior Court judge in Kitsap County.

One of the more infamous residents of the area was Addie Marie Lomax.

Lomax was born in Brenham, Texas, in January 1881 and was first listed as living in Yakima in 1918 at the Lenox Hotel, where she and her common-law husband, Charles Green, were accused of operating a “house of ill repute.”

She acquired a homestead near Badger Hollow in 1920 and operated “Marie’s Barn,” a dance hall and restaurant in a barn near the present-day base in east Selah. One of her business cards advertised chicken and steak dinners, with the “Southern Serenaders Orchestra” providing live music.

But authorities believed Lomax and Green were also serving alcohol illegally during Prohibition. Arrest and search warrants were filled out for Green and “Marie Gomez,” one of Lomax’s aliases, but she contested the charges on the grounds that Gomez was not her legal name.

Some accounts say the barn was also used as a brothel.

Green died in 1937, and Lomax moved to California. When the federal government condemned the property for the base’s expansion in 1953, Lomax went to court to challenge the government’s offer of $12,500 for her property — $144,856 in today’s money.

She argued that because of artesian springs on the property, it was worth $45,000, or $521,483 when adjusted for inflation.

The jury awarded her $23,500 for the property, or $272,330 in today’s cash.

Once acquired by the government, the barn was used as a service club, post exchange and recreation center for the base until it was demolished in 1990, when it was found ineligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places because it lacked architectural integrity.

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