Topic: Cities & Towns
Okanogan is the county seat of Okanogan County in north-central Washington in the productive orchard lands of the Okanogan River Valley. This town site, on the west bank of the Okanogan River, was fir...
The Olympia area was well established by 1853 thanks to the Hudson's Bay Company's nearby Fort Nisqually and Puget Sound Agriculture Company, the early U.S. settlement at Tumwater, and Catholic missio...
Omak, located on the Okanogan River in north central Washington, is the largest city in Okanogan County, with a 2020 population of about 4,750. For centuries, the surrounding area was inhabited by Nat...
Originally a scattered collection of farmhouses on an arid lip of the Columbia Plateau, the town of Othello boomed after the 1909 arrival of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, whic...
The City of Pacific straddles the King-Pierce county line some 28 miles south of Seattle, nestled between Algona to the north and Sumner and Edgewood to the south. The community arose after the Seattl...
Palouse is the second oldest town in Whitman County. It is located on the north fork of the Palouse River, about 15 miles north of Pullman and less than two miles from the Idaho state border. Founded ...
Pasco, one of the Tri-Cities along with Kennewick and Richland, sits at a watery crossroads on the Columbia River between the mouths of the Snake and Yakima rivers. The city was established in 1885 an...
Pateros is a small town in Okanogan County, Washington, in the foothills of the eastern Cascades with a population of around 700. Located along the Cascade Loop Scenic Highway, it is some 60 miles nor...
The small town of Pe Ell is located in the Chehalis River Valley of western Lewis County not far from the border with Pacific County. Non-Native settlement in the area that became Pe Ell began in the ...
Peaceful Valley is a Spokane neighborhood known as a working-class, bohemian enclave located just west of downtown on the south bank of the Spokane River. It is separated from the rest of Spokane by s...
Pomeroy is the seat of Garfield County, the least populated of Washington's 39 counties. Located in the Pataha Valley in the southeastern portion of the state, an agricultural region primarily devoted...
Port Angeles, the county seat of Clallam County since 1890, is built on the site of two major Klallam villages, I'e'nis and Tse-whit-zen, on the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula. It sits on a natu...
Port Gamble represents one of the few remaining examples of company towns, thousands of which were built in the nineteenth century by industrialists to house employees. Founders Josiah Keller, William...
Port Orchard, located in south Kitsap County, was platted as Sidney in 1886 by Frederick Stevens, who wanted to name the future town after his father, Sidney Merrill Stevens. He chose a site on the so...
Few places in Washington can match Port Townsend's long saga of soaring dreams, bitter disappointments, near death, and gradual rebirth. Located on Jefferson County's Quimper Peninsula at the northeas...
Poulsbo, the little fishing town on Liberty Bay in North Kitsap County, due west of Seattle, got its nickname "Little Norway" from the many Norwegian Americans who settled there starting in the 1880s....
Prosser, the county seat of Benton County, is a town of about 5,000 people located in the far western part of the Eastern Washington county. The economy is based on agriculture including orchards, whe...
Puyallup (Pew-al'-up), a suburban city of 36,790 (2007) about five miles southeast of Tacoma, was once the hub of an agricultural cornucopia. The Puyallup Valley is the ancestral home of the Puyallup ...
Quincy is a city in Grant County near the heart of Central Washington in a region sometimes known as the Big Bend Country. It is about 10 miles north of I-90, seven miles east of the Columbia River, a...
The blanket of old growth forest that covered the Willapa Hills surrounding Raymond, on the Willapa River in Pacific County, fueled the town's growth from a handful of farms to a mill town bustling wi...
Reardan, a Lincoln County farm town 23 miles west of Spokane, was founded in 1889 when the Central Washington Railway arrived and established a station named after C. F. Reardan, the line's ...
Redmond is part of the greater Seattle metropolitan area and is located 11 air miles east-northeast of downtown Seattle. Prior to the arrival of white settlers in the nineteenth century, areas in what...
The city of Renton, located some 12 miles southeast of downtown Seattle along the southern shores of Lake Washington, began as a center for extraction industries and, later, manufacturing. Over the ye...
Republic, the county seat of sparsely populated Ferry County in Northeast Washington, sprang into existence as a gold-mining camp in 1896 called Eureka or Eureka Gulch. By 1898 it was crowded with 2,0...