Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Wapato, WA

Wapato is a city in Yakima County, Washington, lying within the external boundaries of the Yakama Nation's reservation.

The town was founded in 1885 by Indian postmaster Alexander McCredy as a Northern Pacific Railroad stop originally named Simcoe.

To end persistent confusion with nearby Fort Simcoe, the town changed its name to Wapato in 1903; the name comes from a Chinook Jargon word for an edible root plant.

Wapato was officially incorporated on September 16, 1908, when it had a population of around 300 people.

Construction of the Irwin Canal in 1896 made irrigated agriculture the town's big business, and through the 1970s and into 1990 the Wapato area produced some of the largest potato and apple crops by tonnage per acre.

Under the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, Yakama tribal communal lands were subdivided into individual allotments whose sale drew new settlers into the Wapato area.

A 'Japanese Town' developed along present-day West 2nd Street between 1916 and 1918, and with more than 1,000 Japanese residents in the Yakima Valley, Wapato became a center of Washington's Japanese population second only to Seattle.

Wapato's Japanese congregation built the architecturally notable Yakima Buddhist Bussei Kaikan hall on West 2nd Street between 1936 and 1941, but residents of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evacuated from the town under Executive Order 9066 in 1942.

In 1952 the local Filipino community established the Yakima Valley Filipino Community Hall in Wapato, the first facility of its kind in the western United States; the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.

During World War II, orchard and field labor around Wapato came in part from German prisoners of war held in a camp between Wapato and Toppenish and from workers brought in under the federal Bracero Program, events that significantly reshaped the town's culture.