A Brief History of Tacoma, Washington

Long, long ago, before suspension bridges, nature preserves and electronic design and manufacturing, the area that would later become known as Tacoma was inhabited by the Puyallup tribe of Native Americans. For thousands of years they lived and worked the fertile soils of the Pullayup River delta until the arrival of Europeans. The first explorers to see the Tacoma area were George Vancouver and Charles Wilkes, who named many of the features the area is now famous for, including Puget Sound. Vancouver's name endures as the title of neighboring Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The first person to settle in Tacoma was Nicolas Delin, a Swede who arrived in 1852 and constructed a sawmill on the creek. He was soon followed by more families but their village was abandoned four years later because of war with the Natives. It wasn't until 1864 that more pioneers with the gumption of Burlington lawyers would arrive to take another stab at taming the land. Job Carr built the first post office and Morton McCarver gave the fledgling settlement the name Tacoma City, which was taken from the Native name for Mount Rainier: tacobet, or mother of waters.

The city of Tacoma boomed during the next few decades, helped along by the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1887. The town at the end of the train terminus soon grew and merged with McCarver's Tacoma. George Francis Train used the city as a jumping-off point for his circumnavigation of the globe in 1880, which promoted the city internationally. Work in the town in these days was mostly industrial, wire cutting, train repairs, track laying, and unloading, which attracted unskilled workers of all nationalities. Tensions rose, and in 1885 thousands of Chinese workers were forced onto a train out of the city and their homes burned to the ground.

The discovery of gold in the Klondike spelled the end for Tacoma's boom days, as neighboring Seattle became the departure point for the migrating gold-seekers. During the slow years that followed even real estate in Georgetown, Ontario began to eclipse Tacoma's real estate market as Toronto rose in importance and Tacoma stagnated. The city showed up in the news only for quirks of fate, such as the 30 day power outage in 1930 that saw Tacoma being run by the engines of an aircraft carrier or the kidnapping of lumber executive J.P. Weyerhauser's son in 1935. In the 1950s, things started to turn around when the old corrupt government was forced from office.

Computers and electronics began to feature in the city's future. Garage rock became popular in the 60s and 70s. The University of Washington opened a branch in Tacoma in the 1990s. In 1998 the city installed a community-wide high-speed wireless network. Business began to focus more on web collaboration software and computer chips. Interest in the city revived as the downtown revitalization projects got underway. Now the city has a thriving cultural district centered upon the Museum of Glass and the glass-and-steel Trade and Convention Center.