The ag community is mourning the passing of William ‘Mac’ McClannahan, an irrigation pioneer that helped launch a multi-billion dollar industry in the Hermiston-Boardman area.
McClannahan passed away Saturday, Jan. 2 in Hermiston at the age of 93.
In the summer of 1967, according to When the High Line Comes, a history of Umatilla Electric Cooperative, the two men formed Oregon Potato and developed a 250-acre irrigated potato field in sagebrush on the Morrow-Umatilla county line. The field attracted reporters from around the Northwest curious to see if potatoes could be grown in the dry desert, with one calling the crop of Norgolds a “minor miracle.”
Two 250-horsepower turbine pumps provided as much as 4,000 gallons a minute to the 20-inch mainline. The next year, Dunn and McClannahan expanded the acreage, and installed a second pumping station out of the Columbia River. Three miles west of Umatilla, it included a pump house and pumping plant substation. Four electric pumps feeding into a 24-inch mainline gave flexibility to the amount of water that could be delivered and used.
McClannahan and Dunn later sold Oregon Potato and purchased Selectric Inc. in Umatilla and then built and operated Dehydration Specialists Inc., an onion dehydration facility at the Port of Umatilla.
A celebration of life gathering with military honors will be held on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016 at 2 p.m. at Oxford Suites in Hermiston.
