When was enumclaw established

Olson and Hanson are remembered as progressives who, unlike other company town owners, encouraged home ownership for their workers and independent downtown businesses.

A two-story masonry-clad building substantially unaltered since its construction in Its design is early Chicago School commercial style. It was part of the first wave of downtown building that moved from wood to masonry.

Trammald and his wife had a dry goods business in the building and an apartment on the second floor. Visit this website on your mobile device or learn more. Source: Washington State Historical Society. That all changed in a matter of hours with the Osceola Mudflow years ago. The river of mud turned into a lake of mud, forming the Enumclaw Plateau. And people were living here before that happened.

Archeological finds under one Enumclaw farm date back years. Now 6, years is a difficult amount of time to get your brain around. Our town is celebrating its first centennial, or is it our 60th centennial? Think of the Revolutionary War and the founding of our country. When was Jesus born? People were already here for two millenia by then. The Egyptian pyramids? More than a thousand years before the first one, people were in our neighborhood. They have been living here for a long time.

If that is hard to grasp, imagine living here 13, years ago. Glacial Period ice is still retreating from the area. Then imagine heading toward Auburn for an elephant hunt. Various tools on an Enumclaw Plateau site have been tentatively dated back that far.

And this is contemporary with the famous find near Sequim of a mastodon skeleton with a spear point embedded in its rib. Thanks to effective lobbying and an outpour of volunteers, county roads linked the community with Thomas between Kent and Auburn. The puncheon log roadway was rough and seasonably impassable due to mud, but it put Enumclaw on the map. On the downside, the Northern Pacific bypassed the town with a cutoff routed through Palmer. Prime movers included George Bruhn, S. Sorenson, and Otto Tamm.

In , a consortium of six Swedish immigrants, including Charles M. Hanson and his three sons, purchased the White River Lumber and Shingle Company, which became the town's major employer. In his History of King County , Clarence Bagley writes, "the two outstanding factors in the economic life of Enumclaw have been the operation of the Hanson Lumber Company and the remarkable development of cooperative enterprises. He credits Enumclaw with the distinction of having more cooperatives than any other community in the Pacific Northwest.

Plateau residents constructed few public building outside of Enumclaw. Rural community activity focused around school houses scattered throughout the area. By the s, Enumclaw became the center of school district consolidation, as evidenced by the substantial, three-story brick J.

Also in , the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad routed a branch line through town, establishing Enumclaw as the major distribution and supply center for area agricultural cooperatives and mining and lumber operations. Johnansen, R. Taylor, Archie Smith, and N. Christensen as councilmen.

On February 1, , in a close vote, citizens of Enumclaw vote to incorporate. It is sandwiched between the Green River to the north and the White River to the south. The population is just over a thousand people.