Topic: Business
Carl Lane Clemans was born in Manchester, Iowa, on May 30, 1871, the same year the Pacific Northwest frontier town of Snohomish was named and platted. Snohomish is where Clemans would own one of the f...
James W. Clise arrived in Seattle the day after the great fire of 1889 had burned down the business district. He promptly founded a real estate company, launching a career that made him one of the mos...
From canoes to container ships, a variety of vessels have carried people and goods between Elliott Bay and the wider world for thousands of years. The introduction of new technologies, such as canoes,...
The Coon Chicken Inn was a fried-chicken restaurant chain located on the Old Bothell Highway on the outskirts of the Seattle city limits, in what is today the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle. The Se...
Mining and railroad magnate, Daniel Chase Corbin ranks as a major shaper of the growth and prosperity of Spokane, the economic and geographic center of the Inland Northwest. He settled in Spokane in ...
Although never known for the cultivation of theatrical talent, during the early twentieth century Seattle had more than its share of businessmen make their mark on the entertainment industry. The star...
Crescent Foods Inc. was a Seattle-based spice and seasoning firm which began in 1883 under the name Crescent Manufacturing Company as a small supplier of vanilla extract. After the discovery of gold o...
John Croce was the founder of Pacific Food Importers, a Seattle-area wholesale imported-food business, and its retail outlet, called Big John's PFI. The business, which began when Croce started sellin...
In 2016, milk was the second highest valued commodity in Washington behind apples, with some 90 percent of the milk produced in the state also processed there. The first substantial herd of cattle arr...
A portion of the area known as Ravensdale in southeast King County was once called Danville. Located on the south side of the Summit-Landsburg Road, Danville lies in the Cedar River valley just below ...
Michael Dederer -- "Mike" to his closest friends -- devoted his life to the Seattle Fur Exchange, building it into one of the foremost fur auctions in the country and an international presence in the ...
Arthur Denny and Mary Ann Boren Denny were members of the Denny Party, arriving at Alki Point (West Seattle) on the schooner Exact on November 13, 1851. They were among Seattle's first ...
In 1851, soon after crossing the Oregon Trail from Illinois with the Denny Party, David Denny and Louisa Boren settled at Alki Point (West Seattle). They were among the first EuroAmerican settlers in ...
No region of Washington was spared the crippling effects of the Great Depression that overshadowed the country in the 1930s, but the residents of San Juan County in Northwest Washington had some advan...
Giuseppe "Joe" Desimone, an immigrant from Naples, settled in Seattle's South Park neighborhood, where he made some money farming and more money investing in real estate. Like many immigrant farmers f...
When Seattleites want to give out-of-town visitors an insider’s tour of their hometown, they’ll often take them to a Dick’s Drive-In restaurant. The very first Dick’s was launc...
The Pacific Northwest has produced its fair share of pioneering record companies over the years including early ones like Seattle's Evergreen, Rainier, Linden, and Morrison Records; Portland's Rose Ci...
James "Jimmie" Durkin gained notoriety in the Inland Empire of Eastern Washington as Spokane's legendary liquor tycoon. Wild tales abound regarding his outlandish exploits and stunts, but beyond becom...
After World War II, a trend toward consolidating schools into larger districts with more modern, standardized facilities created business opportunities for industrial manufacturers. Among these, Educa...
Ben B. Ehrlichman was an investment banker and developer who played a key role in the commercial and civic life of the Puget Sound region from the 1920s through the 1960s. As the president of a holdin...
In the 1950s, before seat belts were standard equipment, young Seattle baby boomers bouncing around in the back seat of the family car were entranced when they were driven past a rotating neon sign in...
John Ellis, former head of Bellevue-based Puget Sound Power and Light (now Puget Sound Energy), is best known for leading the effort to keep the Mariners in Seattle and build the team a new baseball s...
Etiquette Records -- a trail-blazing firm formed by three young Tacoma musicians in 1961 -- was an enterprise that broke all the old rules. Despite its polite and classy sounding name -- not to mentio...
The most fabled of any historic dancehall in Washington -- the Evergreen State -- the Evergreen Ballroom stood for nearly seven decades along a section of Highway 99 called the "old Tacoma and Olympia...