Wapato is a town in Yakima County, Washington, United States. The population was 4,997 at the 2010 census.

The town was founded in 1885 by Indian Postmaster Alexander McCredy as a railroad stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad as Simcoe, Washington. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 made it authenticated for the Yakama Indian Nation to sell their lands, and began to appeal settlers into the area. With the construction of the Irwin Canal in 1896, agriculture became the big business in town. In the forward 1900s, McCredy and George Rankin established the Wapato Development Company and laid out the town site. They received the town’s first bank and began selling lots. In salutation to persistent confusion with comprehensible Fort Simcoe, the town untouched its make known to Wapato in 1903. The 1906 Jones Act additional encouraged Anglos to purchase land from the Yakamas. Wapato was officially incorporated upon September 16, 1908 considering a population of more or less 300 people.

As early as 1905, many Japanese people next began to migrate to the city, mainly from Hawaii. From 1916 to 1918, “Japanese Town” developed along present-day West 2nd Street. With greater than 1000 Japanese subsequently living in the Yakima Valley, the community soon became a center of Washington’s Japanese population, second on your own to Seattle. The Yakima Buddhist Bussei Kaikan (1936–1941), on West 2nd Street, was an architecturally noteworthy building built by members of the congregation. Unfortunately it was not to last, as Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 irritated the Japanese to evacuate from Wapato in 1942, when many residents were sent to internment camps.

During World War II, much of the labor in the orchards and fields roughly Wapato came from either Germans held in a POW camp between Wapato and Toppenish, or from Japanese yet being held in internment camps. At the decline of the war, a labor shortage created a deep hole readily filled by Hispanic migrant workers, and the Bracero Program (a guest-worker program unquestionably to by the US and Mexico during World War II). These events significantly distorted Wapato’s cultural history.

Through the 1970s and into 1990, Wapato produced some of the largest volume potato and apple crops, as tonnage per acre.^{[citation needed]}