Topic: Firsts
The first documented game of lacrosse in Seattle was played in 1896, between two teams from British Columbia, Canada. The original Seattle Lacrosse Club was formed in 1900. Many of its players came fr...
When the Lake Washington Floating Bridge opened in 1940, it was the largest thing afloat in the world and the first bridge to use reinforced-concrete pontoons. The practicality of the technology was r...
Bertha Knight Landes, elected mayor of Seattle in 1926, became the first woman to lead a major American city. She ran on a platform of "municipal housekeeping," vowing to clean up city government. She...
Larrabee State Park was established in 1915, and bears the distinction of being Washington's first state park. Located along and near Chuckanut Drive in Whatcom County south of Bellingham, the 2,683-a...
Dr. Blanche Sellers Lavizzo was the first African American woman pediatrician in the state of Washington. She arrived in Seattle in July 1956 and began her pediatric practice on East Madison Street an...
Walter Vernon Lawson was the first African American police officer in the Seattle Department to be promoted to Sergeant (July 1964). He went on to become Seattle's first African American police Lieute...
In May 1803, the United States purchased Louisiana from France. The doubling of U.S. territory caused President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to send Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) on a westward expediti...
The first church in Seattle was the Methodist Episcopal or the "Little White Church," located downtown on 2nd Avenue and Columbia Street. The White Church Cemetery, next to the church, was Seattle's f...
Manuel Lopes arrived in Seattle in 1852, and operated a barbershop equipped with the first barber chair to be brought around Cape Horn. He was Seattle's first black resident, businessman, and property...
Toklas & Singerman, later called MacDougall & Southwick, was Seattle’s earliest department store. Tracing its history to a small operation in 1874, the business adopted many new technolo...
Washington became one of the first two states, along with Colorado, to legalize adult recreational use of marijuana when voters approved Initiative 502 on November 6, 2012. The vote was the culminatio...
Benjamin F. McAdoo was the first African American architect to maintain a practice in the state of Washington. He was a local civic leader and national advocate for the advancement of low-cost housing...