"Nowadays we think of the Yakima River Canyon as a scenic drive with breathtaking views, or a place to go on a hot summer day for a leisurely river float.

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But in the early 20th century, the canyon was home to a mining operation, complete with two mills and a small boom town.

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There’s little left of Roza other than some concrete foundations and scars on the hillsides where miners extracted and then refined silica from a large deposit of silica sand" ... 

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"The Roza deposit was regarded as the second largest west of the Mississippi, and by 1919 there were two processing mills built at the site, about 2 miles upstream from where the Roza Dam would later be built. The Japanese-America Silicate Co. built the one mill and sold it to another company, and then the Great Western Silica Co. established another mill to process the material.

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In its heyday between 1910 and 1920, about 120 people lived in Roza. While it was never formally incorporated, it had all the basic trappings of a small town: A one-room schoolhouse, a laundry and a company store/post office, along with houses for the workers.

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The Northern Pacific Railway provided passenger service to a “flag stop” at Roza. If someone wanted to catch the train, a flag was put out by the track so the engineer would know to stop.

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Oral histories tell of summer dances at the schoolhouse attended by people from other communities. Music was provided by a fiddler and an accordion player." - Donald W. Meyers, Yakima Herald