On December 31, 1912, Redmond incorporates as a town of the fourth class. Located 11 air miles east-northeast of downtown Seattle, the town's early years will focus on logging and farming. Rapid growth will begin in the 1960s, and by the end of the century Redmond will be a pleasant suburb of Seattle, known for being home to the computer technology giant Microsoft. The first quarter of the twenty-first century will be transformative for the city, changing it from a vanilla suburb into a diverse urban center in its own right.
Melrose
Native Americans sporadically inhabited the area just north of Lake Sammamish for thousands of years before white settlers first arrived in the early 1870s. The city itself got its start in 1871 with the arrival of Luke and Kate McRedmond and, soon after, Warren and Laura Perrigo. The Perrigos operated a popular inn in the village, Melrose House, and named the little village Melrose; however, Luke McRedmond changed its name to Redmond in 1883 during his tenure as the community's postmaster. The community grew slowly but steadily during the final years of the nineteenth century, and this continued into the early 1900s.
In the spring of 1904, James Clise (1855-1938), a prominent Seattle businessman, purchased 78 acres of property near the northern shore of Lake Sammamish. He built a sizeable mansion on the site which he named Willowmoor, and he ran a successful farm on his land. The property later went through several owners, and in 1962 King County purchased the site as its first park. It became known as Marymoor Park, and by 2025 it had grown into a 640-acre expanse on Redmond's southeastern edge. Though technically not a part of the city, the park nevertheless was considered one of Redmond's featured attractions. Among other amenities, it offered both natural and artificial athletic fields, the only velodrome in the region, and a climbing wall.
Incorporation
By the early 1910s, the community was eagerly awaiting the arrival of its 300th resident – the number needed for a town to legally incorporate in the state – and it came on November 24, 1912, with the birth of Ernest Alexander Adams III. (Ernie Adams grew up in Redmond, but in 1935 he and his wife Muriel moved to Nevada and eventually retired there.) His arrival allowed delighted Redmond citizens to start the necessary process to incorporate. In little more than a week, they gathered more than 60 signatures for a petition asking the Board of County Commissioners to set an election on the question. It was held December 23, and the votes were counted a week later. The measure easily passed by a vote of 94 to 9, and the Board quickly certified the same. The certification was filed with the Secretary of State the following day, and Redmond officially became a town of the fourth class on December 31, 1912.
With no opposition, Fred Riel was elected Redmond's first mayor. The town's first council members were A. G. Adams, C. R. Kern, Ed Majors, Henry Weiss, and Theo Youngerman. C. A. Shinstrom was Redmond's first treasurer. The first town council meeting took place in the Walther Hotel on the northeast corner of Leary Way and Cleveland Street, while subsequent meetings were held in various locations over the years before the first town hall opened in 1950.
Logging to Farming to Suburbia
Redmond slowly modernized during the 1910s and 1920s. It replaced its wooden sidewalks with cement walkways and built more buildings and roads. The logging industry was in full stride during these years, but the fiery loss of the Campbell Mill southeast of town in 1924 was a harbinger for the end of the timber business in Redmond. By 1930, most of the area around the town had been cleared.
Redmond gradually changed into a quiet farming community. It became locally known for its Derby Days, a popular bicycle race launched in 1939 around Lake Sammamish which in later years became a far bigger festival. (It was still a summer event in 2025, though bicycle races were no longer held around the lake but were instead held at Marymoor Park.) During the 1940s and 1950s, Redmond continued to slowly grow and acquire the trappings of a full-service town. Its chamber of commerce was established in 1949, and Redmond's first town hall and fire station opened at 16510 NE 79th Street in 1950. Social clubs sprang up too: Redmond's Lion's Club was established in 1947, and the town's Kiwanis Club formed in 1957.
Redmond's population reached 1,000 sometime during the second half of the 1950s, and in 1961 it passed 1,500, making the town eligible to become a city. Residents wasted no time filing the requisite petition and holding a vote, and the measure passed by a resounding 107 to 8. The change allowed the new city to annex additional surrounding neighborhoods, and both its territory and its population mushroomed during the 1960s. Redmond's population increased nearly 700 percent during the decade, to 11,020 in the 1970 Census. The rapid growth continued during the 1970s and 1980s.
These years were capped by the arrival of the computer technology giant Microsoft in Redmond's Overlake neighborhood in 1986. Its first office complex was a relatively modest 30-acre site with six buildings and 800 employees, but this didn't last long. The campus subsequently underwent a series of expansions, and much of the site was remodeled during the first half of the 2020s. In 2025, the property covered more than 500 acres and there were approximately 44,000 employees at the location.
Big Changes
By 1990, Redmond had grown into a pleasant, quiet suburb of Seattle, with a population of 35,800, more than 90 percent of it white. This continued into the early years of the twenty-first century, but radical changes came to Redmond in the 2010s and 2020s. The city essentially tore out much of its commercial district (except for the original downtown) and replaced it with modern six-to-eight story multi-use buildings. As part of the East Link rail extension, a light-rail station opened in the southwestern part of the city at Overlake Village in 2024, and two additional stations were scheduled to open in Redmond in May 2025. Rail service was initially available to the South Bellevue station, and work was well underway to complete the accompanying extension from Bellevue to Seattle by the end of 2025.
In 2025, Redmond was a vibrant, modern city covering more than 17 square miles, with a population estimated at just over 80,000. In addition to the dramatic changes to the city's downtown, its demographics had undergone an equally dramatic change. In the 30 years between 1990 and 2020, the city's percentage of its white population had dropped by nearly half. Redmond was no longer a majority-white city by the late 2010s, though with an estimated makeup of about 48 percent of the town's citizens in 2025, whites still represented a plurality. But even that was close: That same year, the U.S. Census calculated that nearly 40 percent of the city's population was Asian, giving the city a multi-cultural feel far different than what had been just a generation earlier.
