Topic: Business
Beginning in 1936, Robert J. Handy laid the foundation of Seattle-based PEMCO Financial Services, which does more than $1 billion in business annually. Born in Minnesota in 1901, Handy traveled to Pug...
Ole Hanson was a man who packed multiple lives into one. He's best known in Washington for his role, as the city's mayor, in ending Seattle's 1919 general strike, but he's also well known for founding...
The Higo 10 Cent Store (later Higo Variety Store, located in Seattle at 602-608 S Jackson Street) represents one of the few threads linking the bustle of Seattle's Japantown of the 1930s to recent eff...
For almost 20 years beginning in 1896, Clarence Hillman was one of the most prominent businessmen and real estate developers in Seattle. His aggressive and even fraudulent sales of vacant land laid ou...
Menache Israel (b. 1922), whose father, Isaac Israel, owned Butler Dye Works at 1st Avenue and James Street, and who later owned Central Office Supply at 2nd Avenue and James Street, spent his whole c...
Teresa Woo-Murray is an artist and the great-great-granddaughter of Chun Ching Hock (1844-1927), Seattle's first Chinese immigrant, and she has done extensive research into his life and businesses. Wo...
Julie Xia, a student at the Explorer Middle School, located in Everett and part of the Mukilteo School District, won first place in the Junior Division, Historical Paper Category, of the 2009 North Pu...
In 1999, 90-year old John Parker of Port Ludlow penned this account of the 1921 explosion of the Hitt's Fireworks factory in the Rainier Valley. One woman working at the plant was killed.
For more than 50 years, some of the world's most spectacular fireworks came from a collection of sheds on a hill in Columbia City, home to a pharmaceutical chemist with a genius for pyrotechnics, a ta...
Seattle timber-baron brothers Frederick Spencer Stimson (1868-1921) and Charles Douglas "C. D." Stimson (1857-1929) acquired a rural parcel at Derby, near Woodinville, for use as a country retreat and...
Housebuilding in Seattle and the surrounding region has progressed from the communal longhouses of Native Americans through the log cabins of the first settlers to simple, balloon-framed houses. Wood ...
The Hudson's Bay Company, a fur-trading enterprise headquartered in London, began operations on the shores of Hudson Bay in 1670. During the next century and a half, it gradually expanded its network ...
The Igloo, a diner and drive-in restaurant at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue and Denny Way, operated from late 1940 until sometime in 1954. It featured a distinctive twin-domed design intended, li...
The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, was founded in 1905 in Chicago, and by 1908 had become influential among migrant laborers in the Pacific Northwest. Members were dubbed "Wobblies" and soon...
The Isaacson Iron Works Plant No. Two/Jorgensen Forge facility, located at 8531 E Marginal Way S in Tukwila, is bounded on the east by Boeing Field and on the west by the Duwamish Waterway. The proper...
Located on the eastern shore of Tacoma's Thea Foss Waterway, the J. M. Martinac Shipbuilding Corporation built pleasure boats, fishing vessels, and an assortment of ships for the U.S. Navy and Coast G...
A pioneer in the field of photojournalism, Frank Jacobs covered events big and small throughout the Pacific Northwest, but specialized in transportation disasters such as ship and train wrecks. Althou...
History will always remember Jerden Records as the Seattle company that foisted the Kingsmen and their infamous "Louie Louie" on the world back in 1963. But there is much more to the saga behind the f...
Given Tacoma's expulsion of Chinese immigrants in 1885 and the resulting lack of a Chinatown in the city, it's perhaps surprising to find the existence of a Chinese apothecary in the Columbus Hotel in...
This history of the Vashon Island firm K2, manufacturer of fiberglass skis, and later of snowboards and in-line skates, was submitted by Andy Luhn, marketing director of the firm. Company founder Bill...
George Alexander Ballasiotes (b. 1931) opened Key Rexall Drugs in 1963 at 23422 Pacific Highway S in the Midway area of Kent in King County south of Seattle. In the 37 years before he retired, Ballasi...
Washington's state capital Olympia was home to one of the first licensed commercial radio stations in the United States. It was there in 1914 that a Catholic monk affiliated with Saint Marti...
KHQ radio was one of the earliest stations in Washington, first serving Seattle and then Spokane. Louis A. Wasmer (1892-1967), a Seattle radio enthusiast, launched KHQ in 1922, broadcasting out of his...
The Crawford Store is the last intact retail building in the historic Richmond Beach business district. John Holloway, an early resident of Richmond Beach, built the two-story structure in 1922. The b...