On April 11, 1865, word reaches Olympia, Washington, that on the afternoon of April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), Commander of the Confederate Army, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), ...
At about 1 p.m. on April 15, 1865, Olympia and Seattle receive news by telegraph that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) has died from an assassin's shot he received the night before. Later th...
On the last day of April 1865, Mary Low Sinclair and her one-month-old son Alvin, board the small, unfinished steamer Mary Woodruff in Port Madison, Kitsap County, for a journey across Puget Sound and...
In May 1865, Sylvester M. Wait (d. 1891) begins operating a flour mill in the midst of farmland clustered around the convergence of the Touchet River and Coppei Creek in Walla Walla County. The previo...
On July 14, 1865, George Plummer makes a homestead claim on 160 acres of land that would become a business district in West Seattle located at California Avenue SW and SW Admiral Way. In 1869, he rece...
On August 13, 1865, a lay vestry organizes Trinity Parish, Seattle's first Episcopal parish, which builds its first church at 3rd Avenue and Jefferson Street in 1870. It was destroyed in Seattle's Gre...
In 1866, King County settlers petition the Territorial Delegate to Congress, Arthur Denny (1822-1899), against the establishment of a reservation for the Duwamish tribe on the Black River. The Su...
In 1866, brothers William, George, and John Hume, along with Andrew Hapgood, begin operating a small cannery on a scow at Eagle Cliff in eastern Wahkiakum County near the Cowlitz County line in southw...
On June 7, 1866, Chief Seattle, the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes in whose honor Seattle was named, dies at Old Man House in north Kitsap County.
On December 26, 1866, a problem arises between American and British forces jointly occupying San Juan Island when the British commander asks the American commander to return an English deserter who is...
During 1867, the Lake Washington Company opens the first coal mine at Newcastle. Newcastle is located in King County, east of Lake Washington and south of present-day Bellevue.
The opening of a post office is an important marker of the beginning of a community. On January 21, 1867, the White River Post Office (later O'Brien) is established. Lewis McMillan is appointed postma...