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Beaver, SS, First Steamship in Pacific Northwest

The first steamship to operate in the eastern Pacific Ocean was the HMS Beaver, a stout little craft commissioned by the Hudson's Bay Company. She saw continuous service from 1835 until July 26, 1888, when she ran aground at the entrance to Vancouver, B.C., harbor.
File 5260: Full Text >

Boeing's Model 314 Clipper Flying Boat

During the 1930s, transoceanic travel was beyond the capability of all but a handful of aircraft. The solution was offered by giant dirigibles such as the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg and by ever larger "flying boats" -- multi-engine airplanes with boat-like hulls. The most elegant and successful of these was Boeing's Model 314, which first flew in 1938 and operated through World War II. The last of a dozen aircraft built was destroyed in 1951.
File 3253: Full Text >

Bracken, Robert (1841?-1906)

Robert "Bob" Bracken was the first non-Indian to settle permanently in what soon became Asotin County. He arrived late in 1861 when the area was still part of an Indian reservation. Bracken engaged in stock ranching in Asotin County for more than 40 years, living in various places throughout the county. He later became "the authority" on the history of Asotin County in the 1860s, when it was mostly "Indian Territory." Bracken died in 1906, but several landmarks in Asotin County still bear his name.
File 7848: Full Text >

Hollingsworth, Dorothy (b. 1920)

Dorothy Hollingsworth was the first black woman in Washington state to serve on a school board. She was elected in 1975 to the Seattle School Board and was elected its president in 1979. She guided the board during the tense era of school desegregation.
File 291: Full Text >

Hornbein, Thomas (b. 1930)

Tom Hornbein is known for one of mountaineering's epic achievements: the 1963 climb of Mount Everest's West Ridge with Willi Unsoeld (1926-1979), in which the two men traversed the 29,028-foot summit of the earth and spent a night exposed at 27,900 feet. He wrote a celebrated book, Everest: The West Ridge, reissued in 2013 to mark the 50th anniversary of the climb. But Hornbein never returned to the Khumbu region of Nepal, explaining simply, "It was a once in a lifetime event. Life goes forward" (Interview, April 24, 2013). Mountains shaped Hornbein's life but, in the words of climber friend Bill Sumner, "He is far from a one-dimensional famous climber" (Interview, January 7, 2014). Hornbein spent his career as a physician and medical researcher, much of it in Seattle, where he joined the faculty of the University of Washington Medical School shortly after his historic climb and later served for 16 years as chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology. After retiring he moved with his wife Kathy to Estes Park, Colorado, within sight of Long's Peak where his climbing began nearly 70 years earlier.
File 10756: Full Text >

Japanese Castaways of 1834: The Three Kichis

The first Japanese known to have visited what is now Washington arrived in a dismasted, rudderless ship that ran aground on the northernmost tip of the Olympic Peninsula sometime in January 1834. The ship had left its home port on the southeast coast of Japan in October 1832, with a crew of 14 and a cargo of rice and porcelain, on what was supposed to be a routine journey of a few hundred miles to Edo (Tokyo). Instead, it was hit by a typhoon and swept out to sea. It drifted across some 5,000 miles of ocean before finally reaching the Northwest coast with three survivors. Their names were Iwakichi, Kyukichi, and Otokichi. Found and briefly imprisoned by Makah Indians, the "three kichis" spent several months at Fort Vancouver before being sent on to London and eventually to China. They became pawns in the diplomatic chess game that governed Japan's relations with the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century, and were never able to return to their homeland.
File 9065: Full Text >

Landes, Bertha Knight (1868-1943)

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 advocated municipal ownership of utilities such as City Light and street railways. Her single term ended in 1928, but she remained a civic leader and role model for women.
File 5343: Full Text >

Larrabee State Park (Whatcom County)

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-acre park is known for its hikes and scenic views from its higher elevations, and for fishing, clamming, and swimming along its beaches.
File 9861: Full Text >

Lavizzo, Dr. Blanche Sellers (1925-1984)

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 and later on East Jefferson Street. She served as first medical director of the Odessa Brown Children's Clinic. The clinic is a program of Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center.
File 5651: Full Text >

Lawson, Walter Vernon (1926-1982)

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 Lieutenant (July 1967), and first African American police Captain (July 1969).
File 1165: Full Text >

Lewis and Clark in Washington

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 expedition to explore the nation's new piece of real estate. The Corps of Discovery was a party of 33 people, including Sacagawea, a Shohone Indian, and York, an African slave. The Corps, under the leadership of Captain Lewis and Captain William Clark (1770-1838), traveled by foot, horse, and watercraft across North America and back again beginning in Wood River, Illinois, in May 1804, and returning to St. Louis, Missouri, in August 1806. The period the Corps spent along the Columbia and Snake rivers and at the mouth of the Columbia -- from October 1805 to May 1806 -- was principally within what is now the State of Washington.
File 5556: Full Text >

Little White Church Cemetery (Seattle)

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 first formal cemetery. The first documented burials took place in 1856. The burials in this cemetery were eventually removed to the Seattle Cemetery (the site of present-day Denny Park just east of the Space Needle). These removals occurred perhaps in the 1860s, and certainly before 1884.
File 2053: Full Text >

Lopes, Manuel (1812-?)

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 owner, and Seattle's only snare drummer of the day.
File 394: Full Text >

Marijuana Legalization in Washington

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 culmination of a long campaign to end legal penalties for possession and use of the plant and its byproducts, a campaign that since the 1970s had won reduced criminal penalties, permitted medical use, and finally legalization (under state law -- marijuana remained illegal, in Washington and elsewhere, under federal law). This essay traces the history of marijuana, a substance that had been used by humans for thousands of years until being demonized and outlawed across much of the world during the twentieth century, and of the movement to end the criminalization of marijuana use in Washington.
File 10268: Full Text >

McAdoo, Benjamin (1920-1981)

Benjamin F. McAdoo was the first African American architect to maintain a practice in Washington state. He was a local civic leader and national advocate for the advancement of low-cost housing solutions. His Seattle area house designs achieved local acclaim.
File 1161: Full Text >

Miller, Dr. Rosalie Reddick (1925-2005)

Dr. Rosalie Reddick Miller was the first African American woman dentist to practice in the State of Washington. She arrived in Seattle with her husband, Dr. Earl V. Miller, the first black urologist in Seattle, and their three children in the summer of 1959.
File 5659: Full Text >

Morrison, "Morrie" and Alice -- Northwest Music Industry Pioneers

At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, a Pacific Northwest couple -- Howell Oakdeane "Morrie" Morrison (1888-1984) and his wife, Alice Nadine Morrison (1892-1978) -- launched what became the region's first successful local commercial pop music empire. Fueled by a fortune made off royalties earned from a string of original hit song compositions, the Morrisons' pioneering web of interrelated mom-and-pop businesses would grow to include a dance school, a sheet music publishing company, a vaudeville orchestra, a dancehall chain, a record label, a Seattle-based recording studio (with a record-pressing plant), and even a film production endeavor.
File 7548: Full Text >

Owen, Frances Penrose (1900-2002)

Frances Owen served on the Seattle School Board, and on the boards of the Children's Orthopedic Hospital, the Ryther Child Center, and the National Child Welfare League. She chaired the women's division of the Community Chest campaign, and served as a member of the United Good Neighbor planning committee. She was a member of the board of regents of Washington State University and was active in the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (for which she served as president). Mrs. Owen also served as a member on the Advisory Committee on Higher Education. She was known throughout her public career by her married name, Mrs. Henry B. Owen, until her husband died in 1976. She then became Frances Penrose Owen. The Seattle-King County Association of Realtors named her First Citizen of 1967.
File 7192: Full Text >

Prim, John (1898-1961)

John Edmondson Prim was the first African American to serve as deputy prosecuting attorney for King County and the first African American judge in the state.
File 7794: Full Text >

Railroading in Vancouver and Southwest Washington

Railroading in the Pacific Northwest was born in July 1851 near present-day Stevenson, Washington, when Francis A. Chenoweth (1819-1899) built a portage railroad around the treacherous Cascades rapids. It was just two to three miles long and it was crude -- a cart pulled by a mule over wooden rails supported by rough-hewn planks. But it was the first railroad in the region and in the early 1860s was replaced with steel rails and steam power. Southwest Washington railroad history also includes construction of the line from Vancouver to Pasco in 1908 and that same year, erection of the longest double-track bridge in the country at the time (the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway bridge spanning the Columbia). And there was the dashed dream of a rail route over the Cascade Mountains from Vancouver to Yakima.
File 8702: Full Text >

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