Unique sandstone sign revealed at grand opening for Tenino agriculture park

Yahoo

2 days ago

An 11-ton sandstone sign now marks the entrance to Tenino's new Agriculture Innovation Park on Old Highway 99 Southeast.
'I was so honored to be asked to do this,' said stone carver Dan Miller. 'And the other thing that gets me is that we managed to get Tenino sandstone here in Tenino at the Ag Park because it's so important.'
The sign features a 10-ton quarry block base that's chiseled with the name and address of the park as well as a bull wheel and a cattle head. It's topped with an almost one-ton piece that spells out Tenino and features unique symbolism, Miller said.
'Part of the sign there is a mallet and paintbrush,' Miller said. 'The mallet symbolizes us, the stone trades and the long-running history of stone carving in Tenino. The paintbrush symbolizes the arts and the (Tenino) Creative District.'
A camas plant adorns the sign as well. This blue and purple flowering bulb grows in local prairies and has been harvested by Native communities for countless generations.
Lastly, undulating waves line the top piece to represent the area's unique Mima Mounds.
Miller carved the locally sourced stone in about a month and presented it at a Wednesday grand opening event for the agriculture-focused business park. Elite Mechanical Services workers lifted a large box with a crane to reveal the sign to a crowd of onlookers.
Prior to the reveal, the crowd gathered at Stone City Event Center, one of the park's first tenants in the north building. There, Thurston Economic Development Council (EDC) Executive Director Michael Cade introduced a series of people who had a hand in realizing this years-in-the-making project.
'Today is really about partnership,' Cade said. 'Today is really about identifying and recognizing the success, the lineage of history and the lineage of leadership that it takes to build something like this.'
Current Thurston County Commissioner and former Tenino mayor Wayne Fournier had a lot to say about the project.
'Let me be clear: this is not just a business park,' Fournier said. 'This is not just a new building in a rural town. The Tenino Ag Park is more than an economic development project — it's a community-built blueprint for regional resilience, rural prosperity and food security.'
Fournier said he and other city leaders first envisioned the park back when he was mayor of Tenino, an office he held from 2015 to 2023. Then the COVID-19 pandemic showed how vulnerable the community was to a breakdown in the food system, he said.
'It's about building local capacity to grow, to process, to distribute and to sustain ourselves,' Fournier said.
He also gave a shout out to Aslan Meade, director of strategic alliances for the Thurston EDC.
'No one worked harder,' Fournier said. 'No one believed more deeply. Aslan, this community owes you a debt of gratitude.'
Tenino Mayor Dave Watterson said the city appreciated the support from local, county, state and federal partners. He also took a moment to thank city staff for 'working very hard' on this project.
'We're a small community of 2,000 people and to do something like this is really just incredible,' Watterson said.
Former Washington state Rep. J.T. Wilcox said he supported the project to help revitalize the once-vibrant agriculture economy in the region.
'A huge part of our history has just left,' Wilcox said. 'What I think happened is people that were my age who wanted to stay in farming kind of bought into the idea that our job is to produce as much food as we can, as cheaply as possible and feed the world. That's a great mission but almost everybody went out of business doing it.'
Wilcox said he hopes producers realize they are in the food business rather than a farming or commodity business.
'If you're going to stay in business in a place that is not a low-cost producing area, you have to add value to your food and you have to find people that are willing to pay more for it,' Wilcox said.
For the next phase of the Agriculture Innovation Park, Colvin Ranch intends to open a regional meat processing facility that should alleviate a bottleneck in their production. Currently, the ranch hauls its animals east to Pure Country Harvest, another family-run business in Moses Lake, for U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved meat processing.
Ranch owner Jennifer Colvin previously told The Olympian the meat processing facility will be open for business to other local ranchers in the region as well.
Washington state Rep. Ed Orcutt said he is pleased with how the park has turned out so far. He said the meat processing facility will be critically important to bringing costs down for ranchers in the region.
'If you're in farming, you know that you're price takers, you're not price makers,' Orcutt said. 'All of the costs that are associated with producing whatever agricultural product you're producing, whether its crops or whether its livestock, all of those costs come out of your bottom line.'
U.S. Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez said she was honored to fight for this project alongside many others in the room.
'Projects like this is one of the reasons that we were able to bring back our federal tax dollars,' Perez said. 'Good people sat down, they didn't wait for somebody else to tell them that they had a problem and we've got a grant for you. … You all came to us with the solution and said this is a root cause, it's not a band aid, it's a root cause that we're addressing here.'
Colvin Ranch Provisions, a new storefront for the ranch next door, opened in the south building Wednesday morning.
The store sells beef products, HotBabe Hotsauce and Wild Heart Sipping Vinegar as well as candles, soaps and lotions. Jennifer Colvin said more food will fill their shelves within the next couple of weeks.
'This is really about focusing on our local producers and local food,' Colvin said. 'I really want to make this a destination for the place to get the best locally made food in the region.'
HotBabe Hotsauce also recently moved into the south building. Rather than having a storefront, the business has a production kitchen right behind Colvin Ranch Provisions.
In addition to Stone City Event Center, the Tenino-owned north building houses Simply Organic Café and Catering.
The City of Tenino, Thurston EDC Center for Business and Innovation and private investor Dragonwheel Investment Group partnered to create the 13-acre park.
They were supported by the Port of Olympia, Thurston County, Washington State University Thurston County Extension, Northwest Agriculture Business Center and Experience Olympia and Beyond, according to their website.
Cafe, event center open at new Tenino agriculture and business park. Take a look inside