Juan Perez (Juan Josef Perez Hernandez), sailing on the frigate Santiago with a crew made up mostly of Mexicans, was the first non-native to sight, examine, name, and record the islands near British C...
Two members of HistoryLink's staff, Alyssa Burrows and Chris Goodman, happened to be at the Speakeasy Cafe the night it burned down. This is Alyssa'a first-hand account of the confused scene as the bu...
Lillian E. Anderson Sylten Spear was an important player in Snohomish County's public-power movement. She began her career as an educator, served as president of the Snohomish County Parent-Teacher As...
In early 1944, a few score engineers at the Boeing Company founded the Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association. Although not quite a union in the traditional sense, the new group worked...
Bill Speidel answered to many different titles in his hometown of Seattle -- author, historian, raconteur, preservationist, newsman, political operative, entrepreneur, and publisher. Known as "Spy" (a...
Shirley Ross Speidel, the devoted wife of Seattle Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel (1912-1988), was active in her community. She was one of the first members of the King County Landmarks Commissi...
John D. Spellman was the first King County Executive and later served as governor of Washington. Elected Executive in 1969, shortly after the County's Home Rule Charter created the position, Spellman ...
The long career of John Spellman (1926-2018) in local and state politics began in 1967 when he was elected a King County Commissioner. His term overlapped the controversial Forward Thrust capital impr...
One of America's preeminent ceramists, Robert Sperry was a restless creative force who helped shape the University of Washington's ceramics program into one of the country's most influential. Hailed a...
The Spirit of Washington Dinner Train brought the romance of the rails to King County's Eastside for 15 years from 1992 to 2007. For a price guests enjoyed an excursion through the communities east of...
Alexander Spithill was an early Puget Sound pioneer, arriving in October 1856 and settling initially at Utsalady on Camano Island. In 1861 he started what was probably the first logging camp in the Ma...
Spokane is the largest city in Eastern Washington and the commercial hub for an interstate area known formerly as the "Inland Empire" and now as the "Inland Northwest." After settlement in the 1870s, ...
Spokane County is the most populous county in mainly rural Eastern Washington and home to the second largest city in the state. After settlement in the 1870s, Spokane became the hub for the mining, ti...
Education efforts in the Spokane area began with the local Native Americans, were then picked up by missionaries, and subsequently brought into the mainstream of Euro-American civic life. Like any oth...
In the 1960s, Spokane business, trade, and community leaders began to prioritize the need for a two-year community college for vocational education, and in 1963 an application to convert the Spokane T...
In this original essay, Spokane historian Sharon De Mills-Wood writes about the Broadview Dairy, a turn-of-the-century business that grew along with the burgeoning city, first delivering milk in horse...
Poor Clare Nuns are members of the Franciscan Order of St. Clare, a Roman Catholic order of nuns founded in 1212. In Spokane, the Poor Clare Nuns trace their history to 1914, when six women opened a m...
The White Elephant stores began in Spokane in 1946 when John R. Conley Sr. started selling Army surplus materials before converting his business into a sporting goods store. As he began to welcome the...
Hillyard, known today as a neighborhood in Spokane's northeast quadrant, began as a separate town in 1892. It was built around the Great Northern Railroad's rail yards and named after Great Northern m...
Moran Prairie and Glenrose Prairie, located in what is now southeast Spokane, were favorites of prehistoric American Indians and were populated at an early date by white settlers. The areas were attra...
From the 1880s through the 1940s, a bustling Chinatown -- or to be more accurate, an international district -- thrived in downtown Spokane. It began in the 1880s mostly as a stopping point for Chinese...
The Spokane River is a tributary of the Columbia River, its shores important as a cradle of the oldest known continuously occupied human habitation in present-day Washington. It begins at Lake Coeur d...
The Spokane Stock Exchange operated from 1897 until 1991. It was one of about 200 regional exchanges initially trading in mining shares issued as penny stocks (shares selling below a dollar). Spokane,...
The Spokane Symphony, founded in 1945 under the name Spokane Philharmonic Orchestra, soon evolved into Spokane's premier cultural institution. It was the brainchild of conductor Harold Paul Whelan (19...