This People's History consists of a letter written in June 1958, describing life in Westport during the years following 1912. Westport is located in Grays Harbor County on a peninsula on the Pacific c...
The town of Westport is located in Grays Harbor County, on the south shore of Grays Harbor. Originally home to a large Chehalis tribal village, the Native peoples were decimated by a smallpox outbreak...
Weyerhaeuser is the world's largest producer of lumber. The firm arrived in the Pacific Northwest when Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834-1914) and his partners purchased 900,000 acres of forest land in Wes...
On May 24, 1935, George H. Weyerhaeuser (1926-2022), age 9, was kidnapped off the street in Tacoma in broad daylight. His captors mailed a note to the Weyerhaeuser family, demanding $200,000 for the b...
Whatcom County was established on March 9, 1854, by the Washington territorial government from a portion of Island County. The name Whatcom derives from a Nooksack word meaning "noisy water" and it wa...
On February 1, 1996, a jury in Whatcom County Superior Court finds two defendants -- Bellingham newsstand owner Ira Stohl and store manager Kristina Hjelsand -- not guilty of obscenity charges. Stohl ...
Wheat has been cultivated in Washington since the 1820s and remains the most important agricultural product in much of eastern Washington -- and among the state's top five crops. It was first grown in...
Although dense primeval forest covered much of Whidbey Island, there were also fertile prairies that for centuries were used and maintained by Indigenous people. Most were on Central Whidbey, the ance...
Long before "environmentalism" became a common term, Aubrey Lee White of Spokane worked to ensure the enduring quality of the environment of his adopted city and its surroundings. The Maine native arr...
At the southwest edge of Seattle, in King County, a plateau stretches from Puget Sound in the west to the Duwamish River in the east, home of the White Center neighborhood that straddles SW Roxbury St...
The early history of the White Center Library followed a winding path. The library began in a private home in 1943 and moved to the basement of a fieldhouse in 1946, the year that the White Center Lib...
Glenn White -- like his father before him -- possessed a knack for deducing the mysteries of electricity and the material sciences. And advanced schooling allowed the polymath son to pursue an incredi...
In February 1884, missing the cold snap that closed the Snohomish River to steam navigation, carpenter John S. White and his family arrived in Snohomish, a small settlement on the river a dozen miles ...
Since the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of non-Indian settlers in the White River Valley (also known as the Green River Valley), the White and Green rivers have undergone many changes. Annual floods ...
White Salmon, a town of 2,540 residents in Klickitat County, is on the north side of the Columbia River, 65 miles east of Portland, Oregon. The town was named after the nearby White Salmon River, whic...
Founded in 1890 by pioneering woman doctors Eva St. Clair Osburn and Ella Fifield, White Shield Home was a maternity hospital for unwed mothers. Its first patient was an expectant girl found in labor ...
Native American leader Bernie Whitebear guided the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, which provided social services to Native Americans. He ran the foundation for 30 years. He was famous for le...
In 1926, local newspapers were awash in one of the largest regional scandals of that era. Letitia Whitehall, a 14-year-old girl who lived near Kirkland, was brutally raped and murdered: Her body was f...
Letitia Whitehall, a 14-year-old girl from Kirkland, was murdered on Halloween Eve, 1926, on her way home from the dentist. For the next three months, the local police and the Sheriff's office were st...
Whitehorn (Whatcom County) was home for more than half a century to a small but thriving community that was swept away when a large oil refinery opened on the site in 1971. In 2009, the Point Whitehor...
Whitman College began as Whitman Seminary, a pre-collegiate academy for pioneer boys and girls. Cushing Eells (1810-1893) obtained the first charter for the school in 1859, to memorialize his missiona...
Whitman County, located in southeastern Washington, has a population of 40,740 (2000 Census) and a land area of 2,159 square miles. The county was formed on November 29, 1871, and is named after Marcu...
Marcus Whitman, a man with unwavering cultural and religious convictions, was one of the first missionaries in the Northwest. He and his wife, Narcissa, established a mission on Cayuse land near Walla...
Narcissa Whitman might have lived out her life in historical obscurity but for two developments. The first was her decision, in 1836, to marry a missionary named Marcus Whitman (1802-1847) and travel ...