From 1978 to 1981, a rapist who committed as many as 37 brutal assaults kept the city of Spokane terrified. Police scoured the city for the "South Hill rapist" so-named because many of the rapes took ...
From 1888 to 1936, streetcars played a clanging and colorful role in the history of Spokane. The city's first streetcar was pulled down Riverside Avenue by a team of horses. Within two years, steam-po...
John Wilson Sprague was born in the state of New York, became a successful businessman in Ohio, served the Union cause with distinction during the Civil War, and then moved to the Northwest in 1870 as...
Ira Spring had the great good fortune to spend a lifetime doing what he enjoyed most -- hiking, climbing, and skiing throughout the Pacific Northwest and documenting his way in words and pictures. He ...
St. Nicholas School was a private nonsectarian girls' school founded in 1910 and located in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The school was named to honor St. Nicholas, the patron saint of childr...
Though the Irish in Seattle have always celebrated St. Patrick's Day, there was no official St. Patrick's Day Parade in Seattle until 1972. Before (and after) that first official procession, the late ...
Washington state's second-largest logging and lumber operation during its heyday, the St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Company controlled 90 square miles of standing timber in Pierce County and milled bil...
Before rail service reached the West Coast steamboats, stagecoaches, and wagons were the principal means of transportation to and from the inland areas of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho territories. Go...
John Stanford (1938-1998) was the superintendent of Seattle Schools for just three years and seriously ill during the last few months, but he continued to maintain a high profile in the community as w...
Betty (Batchelor) Miles of Samish Island contributed this piece on Jack W. Stangle, who was a celebrated artist in Seattle from 1953 to his death in 1980. He was a member of the Northwest School and h...
This is an account by Stanley Willhight (b. 1914) of the Willhight family's journey to Vashon Island in 1883. Willhight also recalls the impressive sight of trains in Smith Cove carrying huge bales of...
Richard Hall of Coupeville offers this account of the business his grandfather, Stanton Hall, built in Everett. Stanton Hall later served as a member and as president of the Washington State Universit...
Stanwood is located in northwest Snohomish County at the mouth of the old channel of the Stillaguamish River. Most of the town is on the river delta and in recent years it has begun to grow to the ea...
Seattle-based Starbucks is a multi-national corporation that sells coffee drinks, coffee beans, food, and beverages at its retail stores as well as wholesale to other outlets. When the first Starbucks...
Matt Starwich was a colorful King County sheriff who left a wealth of stories to delight historians. He first rose to prominence as a deputy sheriff in the coal-mining town of Ravensdale in southeast ...
This file presents the statement of Alonzo Russell (1839-1926), Seattle pioneer, on his arrival to the region in 1852 as a boy of 14, and on the Indian War of 1856. His statement, provided by Liz Russ...
In September 1939, the U.S. Navy relocated a secret radio listening post from Fort Stevens, Oregon, to Fort Ward on Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, a few miles from Seattle in Puget Sound. The rad...
African American Seattleite Joseph Isom Staton (b. 1910) was born in Fort Lawton, Washington, on September 19, 1910. His mother originally came from Kentucky, his father from Missouri. This is an exce...
With a surface area of 600 acres, Steamboat Rock is something more than a "rock." A massive basalt butte, several miles long and 800 feet high, it looms like a battleship above Banks Lake, a manmade r...
Prior to the building of reliable overland roads and railroads, river travel was the primary method of transporting goods and people in the White River Valley. The indigenous Coast Salish people used ...
On April 23, 1899, two ships collide in the early morning darkness on Commencement Bay. The Glenogle is a 400-foot ocean liner bound for Asia. The City of Kingston is a 246-foot da...
During the dark days of the Great Depression, Tacoma boxer Freddie Steele captured the region's imagination as he rose to his sport's ultimate coronation: world champion. Steele's footwork, speed, and...
Steilacoom was one of the earliest non-Native settlements in the future state of Washington. Established just six years after Oregon Trail emigrants first arrived on Puget Sound, it quickly became a h...
Architect Victor Steinbrueck, perhaps best known for his efforts to protect Seattle's historic Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square, worked to adapt modern architecture to reflect the Puget Sound regi...