My book about a 110-year-old egg farm

After two decades, the Wilcox Farms history finally sees print.

By

Lisa Brunette

Scanning my list of publications, you might come across two corporate histories, both covering iconic Pacific Northwest entities:

• One chronicling the unique history of maritime firm General Construction Company (now owned by Kiewit), which built both of Seattle’s floating bridges, along with many of the picture-postcard bridges up and down the Northwest coast.

• Another that tells the story of how two brothers took over Wilcox Family Farms in the wake of their father’s premature passing and successfully steered it through major changes in the food industry.

As timing is everything in publishing, an economic crash ensured that neither of these books, both finished, saw print.

Until now.

Late this past fall, Melinda Bargreen, longtime music critic for the Seattle Times and a Wilcox family relative by marriage, contacted me out of the blue to let me know she had written an updated history of the farm covering the past twenty years, and they were also planning to finally print my old manuscript in hardcover.

Per the original intention, both books are commissioned works meant as gifts for family, friends, and associates of the farm and not available to the general public. But I’d like to share the Wilcox family’s compelling story by offering a review with excerpts of the book here. It’s been twenty years since I wrote the manuscript, and that distance affords me a certain degree of objectivity.

Through a lifelong obsession with food and farms, I can tell you that the Wilcox history speaks volumes about both where we’ve been and where we still need to go.