Cashmere Museum and Historic Pioneer Village

Cashmere grew up as Mission, a settlement named for the Catholic missionaries who worked in the valley from the 1850s, with ranchers and squatters following in the 1880s. The Great Northern Railroad built its main line through the valley after 1892, and in 1900 the town finally became a flag stop, gaining a small section house staffed by two employees — a building preserved today on the property of the Cashmere Museum and Pioneer Village. Renamed Cashmere in 1903, after a local judge claimed the valley resembled the foothills of Kashmir, and incorporated in 1904, the town blossomed once the hard-won Peshastin Ditch and the Mission Canal turned hundreds of acres of dry land into fertile farmland, making it a shipping point for the valley's growing fruit industry. The museum's historic pioneer village keeps buildings from that settlement era standing.