97 Fun Facts About Washington State

Which president proclaimed Washington the 42nd state on 11 November 1889?

Benjamin Harrison kept Washington waiting: he refused to act until the territory sent properly certified paperwork, then signed the proclamation on the day the corrected copy reached the White House.

Washington Territory was almost given what name before it honoured a president?

Congress was offered 'Columbia Territory' in 1853, but Kentucky's Richard Stanton argued it would be confused with the District of Columbia, so it was named for George Washington.

What is the capital of Washington state?

Olympia was named territorial capital by Governor Isaac Stevens when he arrived in November 1853 after an overland trek, and it has stayed Washington's capital ever since.

Washington's widely used nickname is what?

The Evergreen State was coined around 1890 by Seattle realtor C.T. Conover for the state's forests; it is stamped on licence plates, yet as of 2026 the legislature has never formally adopted it.

Washington is the largest U.S. producer of which fruit?

Apples are Washington's signature crop: the state grows well over half the national supply, and its growers say every one is still picked by hand.

The state vegetable of Washington is which sweet onion?

The Walla Walla sweet onion grew from seed that a retired French soldier, Peter Pieri, brought from Corsica around 1900; it became the state vegetable in 2007.

Which conifer became Washington's state tree in 1947?

Western hemlock was the Portland Oregonian's pick when it teased Washington in 1946 for lacking a state tree; local papers chose the western red cedar, but lawmaker George Adams called hemlock the forest industry's future backbone and won.

Which mountain is Washington's highest point?

Mount Rainier, an active volcano, carries more glacier ice than any other peak in the lower 48 states, so an eruption could melt it into mudflows that sweep through the densely settled valleys below.

Washington's highest peak is also known by which Native American name?

Tahoma, also rendered Tacoma, comes from the Native names for the mountain; a British naval explorer who sighted the peak in 1792 named it after a fellow officer instead.

On 18 May 1980, which Washington volcano erupted after the largest landslide in recorded history?

Mount St. Helens erupted when an earthquake sent its north face sliding away in the largest landslide in recorded history; the sideways blast that followed killed 57 people.

Which strait separates Washington's Olympic Peninsula from Canada's Vancouver Island?

The Strait of Juan de Fuca honours a Greek pilot whose claim to have found it in 1592 was probably a tall tale; trader Charles Barkley, who really did sail in, put his name on the map in 1787.

The Space Needle was built for which event?

The 1962 World's Fair got its centrepiece from a doodle: organiser Edward Carlson sketched a tower after seeing one with a restaurant in Stuttgart, and architects turned it into the Space Needle.

The Space Needle stands how tall?

The Space Needle rises 605 feet; when it opened in 1962 it was the tallest structure west of the Mississippi, and it was engineered to withstand 200 mph winds.

Which company was founded in Seattle in 1916 by a lumber industrialist?

Boeing began in 1916 as Pacific Aero Products: timber man William Boeing had just built a seaplane, the B&W, with navy officer Conrad Westervelt, and he renamed the firm after himself a year later.

Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond since 1986, was founded in 1975 in which city?

Albuquerque was home to MITS, maker of the Altair 8800 computer, so Gates and Allen set up Microsoft there to sell it their BASIC software; they moved to Bellevue, Washington, in 1979.

Which Seattle-area giant was incorporated in 1994 as Cadabra?

Amazon started in Jeff Bezos's garage in Bellevue as an online bookstore named Cadabra, a play on 'abracadabra'; within months he swapped the magic word for the name of a great South American river.

Starbucks opened its first store in 1971 beside which Seattle landmark?

Pike Place Market lay just south of the first Starbucks, which opened at 2000 Western Avenue; the shop later moved into the Market at 1912 Pike Place, so the store billed as the original is really its second home.

Pike Place Market opened in 1907 on which promise?

Meet the producer was the point: farmers had been at the mercy of commission-house middlemen and their markups, so in August 1907 the city gave them a street where they could sell direct.

Which Washington dam is the largest hydropower producer in the United States?

Grand Coulee Dam can generate more than 6,800 megawatts; switched on as the Second World War began, its power went to the Northwest's aluminium smelters, shipyards and aircraft plants.

Plutonium made at Washington's Hanford Site fuelled the atomic bomb dropped on which Japanese city in 1945?

Nagasaki was the fallback: the bomber's first-choice target, Kokura, was hidden from view that morning, so Fat Man, built around plutonium from Hanford's B Reactor, fell on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

The 1859 'Pig War' between the U.S. and Britain was a bloodless standoff over which archipelago?

The San Juans were claimed by both nations when an American settler shot a British company's pig rooting in his garden; the pig was the only casualty, and German arbitration awarded the islands to the US in 1872.

The Great Seattle Fire of 1889 began with an overheated pot of what?

Glue boiling over in a woodworking shop started the blaze on 6 June 1889, which destroyed the business district; Seattle rebuilt in brick and raised its streets, leaving old ground floors below as the Seattle Underground.

The first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed in 1940, was nicknamed what?

Galloping Gertie earned its nickname from its rolling deck; the bridge opened on 1 July 1940 and tore itself apart on 7 November in winds of only about 40 mph, undone by aeroelastic flutter.

Which guitarist who played Woodstock in 1969 was born in Seattle?

Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle on 27 November 1942, closed Woodstock on the morning of 18 August 1969 with his feedback-laden 'Star-Spangled Banner'.

The band Nirvana, pioneers of grunge, formed in 1987 in which Washington town?

Aberdeen is where Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic became friends through a shared love of the local band the Melvins; they formed Nirvana there in 1987.

At which Seattle school did Bill Gates meet Paul Allen, his future Microsoft co-founder?

Lakeside gave its pupils rare access to a Teletype terminal and shared computer time in the late 1960s; Gates and the older Paul Allen bonded over it and later founded Microsoft together.

Seattle Seahawks fans are known by which nickname?

The 12s get their name from the idea that a loud crowd is the team's 12th player; the Seahawks, in the NFL since 1976, retired jersey number 12 in 1984 in their fans' honour.

Which Seattle Mariner entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2016 with 99.32% of the vote?

Ken Griffey Jr. played alongside his own father for the Mariners in 1990, and that September the two hit back-to-back home runs against the Angels.

David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks was shot in and around which Washington town?

Snoqualmie and nearby North Bend had every location the pilot script called for, co-creator Mark Frost recalled; the 268-foot falls beside the town became famous worldwide through the show.

The 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle starred Tom Hanks and which actress?

Meg Ryan plays Annie Reed opposite Tom Hanks in Nora Ephron's 1993 film, in which a boy phones a radio show to find his widowed father a new wife.

The Twilight novels and films are set in which real, very rainy Washington town?

Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula and once billed as the Logging Capital of the World, reinvented itself as a tourist stop after Stephenie Meyer set Twilight there.

Which Washington town rebuilt its centre as a Bavarian village in the 1960s to revive a failing economy?

Leavenworth was close to a ghost town after its railroad moved away and the sawmills closed, so in the 1960s its leaders gambled on rebuilding the main street as an Alpine village to pull in tourists.

Puget Sound is part of which larger body of water, named in 2009?

The Salish Sea honours the Coast Salish peoples who first lived along it; Bellingham professor Bert Webber proposed the name in the late 1980s so the cross-border waters would be seen as one ecosystem.

Puget Sound is named for Peter Puget, a lieutenant on whose 1792 expedition?

George Vancouver sent Lieutenant Peter Puget out in small boats to chart the southern inlets in May 1792 and named those waters for him; the name later spread to the whole sound.

When Washington State Ferries began in 1951, what did many expect would soon make the service obsolete?

Bridges were expected to span Puget Sound before long, so the state's 1951 takeover of the private Black Ball Line's routes was meant as a stopgap; instead the fleet grew into what is, as of 2025, the largest ferry system in the U.S.

Washington's largest river rises in which mountains?

The Canadian Rockies cradle Columbia Lake, where the river rises; it first flows north-west, away from the United States, before swinging south into Washington.

The giant tunnel boring machine that dug Seattle's downtown highway tunnel was named what?

Bertha was named, from schoolchildren's suggestions, after Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle's first female mayor; the machine then broke down under downtown and sat idle for about two years.

Which Washington city hosted Expo '74, the first world's fair with an environmental theme?

Spokane, one of the smallest cities ever to stage a world's fair, cleared decades of railroad tracks from beside its river falls for the event, and the site is now Riverfront Park.

Walla Walla's name is most often translated from its Native root as what?

Place of many waters is the usual translation: the root means water, and doubling it has also been read as running waters, where a small stream meets a larger one.

Olympic National Park protects rainforests, alpine meadows and what third landscape?

A stretch of Pacific coast joined the park in 1953; Theodore Roosevelt had first protected the Olympic peaks in 1909, largely to save the elk herds that already bore his name.

Washington shares an international border with which Canadian province?

British Columbia meets Washington along the 49th parallel, fixed by an 1846 treaty; the line lops off Point Roberts, a scrap of Washington that can be reached by road only through Canada.

DNA tests in 2015 showed Kennewick Man, the ancient skeleton found in Washington in 1996, was most closely related to whom?

Modern Native Americans, the genome showed, ending a fight that began when scientists judged his skull closer to the Ainu or Polynesians; five Northwest tribes reburied 'the Ancient One' in 2017.

Three years before Britain's Captain Cook sailed by, sailors from which country made the first recorded European landing in Washington?

Spain's Bruno de Heceta landed at Point Grenville in 1775 and claimed the coast; after an attack by Quinault warriors he named the spot Point of the Martyrs.

Washington Territory was carved out of which larger territory in 1853?

Oregon Territory lost its northern part after settlers around Puget Sound, days of travel from the capital at Salem, petitioned Congress in 1852; Millard Fillmore signed the split two days before leaving office.

Which weather pattern gave Hanford a state-record 120 °F in June 2021?

A heat dome, a stubborn ridge of high pressure, parked over the Northwest for days; the same event gave Canada its hottest reading ever, nearly 50 °C at Lytton, a village that burned down the next day.

Which is Washington's most populous county?

King County was named in 1852 for vice president-elect William Rufus King, a slaveholder; in the 1980s the county kept the name but declared that it now honours Martin Luther King Jr.

Which Washington wine region, also famed for hops, became the state's first federal AVA in 1983?

Yakima Valley was the first wine region in the whole Pacific Northwest to win federal recognition; it gets only about eight inches of rain a year, so its growers farm by irrigation.

Which family holiday was first celebrated in Spokane, Washington in 1910, after a campaign by Sonora Smart Dodd?

Father's Day was Dodd's tribute to her own dad, a Civil War veteran who raised six children alone after his wife died. It took until 1972 for the day to become a permanent national holiday.

Which nickname for UFOs did newspapers coin after pilot Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting in Washington's Cascades?

Flying saucer appeared in headlines within two days of Arnold reporting nine shiny objects moving at an estimated 1,200 miles per hour. He had first taken them for a flock of geese.

Which ancient English monument has a full-size concrete replica at Maryhill, Washington, built as a war memorial?

Stonehenge was copied here by entrepreneur Sam Hill, a Quaker who believed the original was a place of sacrifice and wanted to show that war still claimed lives the same way.

Which sport, invented in 1965 as a children's backyard game on Bainbridge Island, became Washington's state sport?

Pickleball was cobbled together from a badminton court, paddleball paddles and a wiffle ball at the summer home of future congressman Joel Pritchard.

Costco's house brand takes its name from which Washington city, where the retailer once had its headquarters?

Kirkland was Costco's base from 1987 to 1996, and the Kirkland Signature label launched in 1995, a year before the company moved to Issaquah.

Starbucks, founded in Seattle in 1971, takes its name from the chief mate in which classic American novel?

Moby-Dick came to mind after the founders spotted a mining camp called Starbo on an old map of the Cascades, which reminded them of first mate Starbuck.

Which Japanese video game company runs its American operations from Redmond, Washington, the same city as Microsoft?

Nintendo named Mario after Mario Segale, the landlord of the Tukwila warehouse it rented before moving its American base to Redmond.

Which hijacker parachuted from an airliner over southwest Washington in 1971 with $200,000 and was never identified?

D. B. Cooper's leap is the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history. The FBI concluded that he probably jumped over the town of La Center.

Which NBA team did the Seattle SuperSonics become when the franchise left Washington after the 2007–08 season?

Oklahoma City Thunder took rookie star Kevin Durant with them after a $45 million settlement with the city of Seattle over the arena lease.

Which global delivery company began in Seattle as the American Messenger Company, founded with $100 of borrowed money?

UPS painted its vehicles brown because a partner argued yellow would be hard to keep clean, pointing out that Pullman railroad cars were brown for the same reason.

Washington flies the only U.S. state flag with a background of which colour, behind a portrait of the first president?

Green was championed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, whose 1915 design set the state seal on a flag of that colour. No other state flag shows a U.S. president either.

Which gold strike turned Seattle into a boomtown from 1897, as thousands of prospectors bought their supplies there?

The Klondike rush reached Seattle when the steamer Portland docked with gold aboard, and a publicity drive by newspaperman Erastus Brainerd made the city its main supply centre.

Which Cheers spin-off follows a psychiatrist who returns to his hometown of Seattle to host a radio call-in show?

Frasier won 37 Primetime Emmys, a record for a scripted series at the time, including Outstanding Comedy Series five years running.

Which long-running ABC medical drama is set at a fictional Seattle hospital but filmed mainly in Los Angeles?

Grey's Anatomy shoots most hospital exteriors at a veterans' clinic in California, and sharp-eyed viewers have spotted dry mountains through the walkway windows.

Which Seattle band's 1991 debut album Ten produced the hit singles Alive, Even Flow and Jeremy?

Pearl Jam first performed as Mookie Blaylock, after a professional basketball player, and titled the album Ten after his jersey number.

Which crooner and Oscar-winning actor was born in Tacoma and raised in Spokane, where a theatre bears his name?

Bing Crosby worked one summer as a property boy at Spokane's Auditorium, where watching Al Jolson ad-lib on stage left him spellbound.

Which martial arts film star attended the University of Washington and opened his first kung fu school in Seattle?

Bruce Lee met his wife, Linda Emery, while both were students there, and he is buried beside his son Brandon in Seattle's Lake View Cemetery.

Which marine mammal became a Washington state symbol in 2005 after a campaign by Oak Harbor elementary school students?

Orca pods travel through Puget Sound every year, and pupils at Crescent Harbor Elementary won the title by arguing the whales draw tourists and matter in Native culture.

Washington farms grow roughly three-quarters of America's supply of which key ingredient in brewing beer?

Hops put Washington ahead of every other state, and its farms also made it the leading U.S. producer of spearmint oil, pears and sweet cherries.

Which spring flower draws crowds every April to a month-long festival in the Skagit Valley, north of Seattle?

Tulips fill the valley because the Washington Bulb Company there became North America's leading grower of tulip, daffodil and iris bulbs. The festival claims more than a million visitors.

Seattle's State Route 520 bridge across Lake Washington holds the world record as the longest of which type?

Floating on 77 concrete pontoons, the span opened in 2016 and took the world record from the bridge it replaced on the same crossing, which was 130 feet shorter.

North Cascades National Park holds about 300 of which natural feature, the most in any U.S. park outside Alaska?

Glaciers here number roughly 312, a third of all those in the lower 48 states, and the rock they grind to powder turns some of the park's lakes turquoise.

Which giant burrowing clam, harvested from the mudflats of Puget Sound, can live for more than a century?

Geoduck is pronounced gooey-duck, a name taken from the Lushootseed language, and the clams can live at least 168 years.

Which mall snack chain opened its first bakery in 1985 at SeaTac Mall in Federal Way, Washington?

Cinnabon began with the lease: restaurateur Rich Komen had already secured the mall space before he and a colleague worked out the bakery concept to fill it.

Which Seattle billionaire bought the Seahawks in 1997 and founded the city's Museum of Pop Culture?

Paul Allen bought the team from an owner who had tried to move it to southern California, and he opened the museum in 2000 in a Gehry-designed building.

Which upscale department store chain began in Seattle in 1901 as a shoe shop co-founded by a Swedish immigrant?

Nordstrom sold nothing but shoes for six decades, adding clothing only in 1963 when it bought a Seattle fashion shop called Best's Apparel.

Which Japanese outfielder was named both Rookie of the Year and American League MVP with the 2001 Seattle Mariners?

Ichiro Suzuki went on to collect 262 hits in 2004, breaking a single-season record that had stood for 84 years.

The Boys in the Boat tells how a University of Washington rowing crew won gold at which city's 1936 Olympics?

Berlin saw the crew, nine students who had worked their way through college in the Depression, narrowly beat Italy and Germany to the gold medal.

Which single-panel newspaper cartoon did Tacoma-area native Gary Larson draw for fifteen years until 1995?

The Far Side coined thagomizer as a joke name for the spikes on a stegosaur's tail, and scientists gradually adopted the word as an informal term.

Which independent record label, founded in Seattle in 1986, released Nirvana's debut album Bleach?

Sub Pop got the album cheaply: the thirty hours of recording were billed at $606.17, and sales of the record helped keep the label going for years.

Which Tacoma-born author wrote the 1965 science fiction epic Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis?

Frank Herbert found the idea while researching a magazine article on Oregon's coastal sand dunes, and nearly twenty publishers turned the finished novel down.

Seattle's first Major League Baseball team, the Pilots, lasted one season before moving in 1970 to become which club?

Milwaukee Brewers became the name only after a judge declared the Pilots bankrupt seven days before Opening Day, while the team's equipment sat in Utah awaiting a destination.

Which Seattle outfitter patented America's first quilted down jacket in 1940 after a bout of hypothermia?

Eddie Bauer sold the jacket in his Seattle shop as the Skyliner, and six years earlier he had patented something quite different: a standardised shuttlecock.

Which Tacoma-born artist has a permanent exhibition of his blown-glass sculptures beside Seattle's Space Needle?

Dale Chihuly lost the sight in one eye in a car crash and later injured a shoulder, so he hires a team of glassblowers instead of holding the pipe himself.

Which 1982 film introduced Vietnam veteran John Rambo, who drifts into the fictional town of Hope, Washington?

First Blood was shot with an ending in which Rambo dies, as in the novel, but a test audience reacted so angrily that the producers used backup footage in which he survives.

The elk of Olympic National Park, North America's largest subspecies, are named after which U.S. president?

Theodore Roosevelt returned the compliment in 1909, setting aside Mount Olympus National Monument largely to protect the herds that carried his name.

Which garage-rock classic did a Seattle TV comedian campaign in 1985 to make Washington's official state song?

Louie Louie never did replace Washington, My Home, but it has lore of its own: the FBI spent 31 months investigating the Kingsmen's recording and could not make out the words.

Which flowering shrub did Washington women choose as the state flower in an 1892 vote, before they had suffrage?

Rhododendron beat clover in the final count after six flowers were considered, because the state needed an entry for a floral exhibit at the 1893 Chicago exposition.

Which Olympic Peninsula town, sheltered by a mountain rain shadow, is nicknamed the Lavender Capital of North America?

Sequim receives less than 16 inches of rain a year, about the same as Los Angeles, which earned it the local nickname Sunny Sequim.

Ice Age floods from which vanished lake, held back by an ice dam, carved Washington's Channeled Scablands?

Lake Missoula's ice dam failed dozens of times, yet when geologist J Harlen Bretz argued in 1923 that a huge flood had carved the scablands, peers wedded to gradual change disregarded him.

Which narrow 50-mile lake in north-central Washington is the third deepest in the United States?

Lake Chelan trails only Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe, and it is so deep that its floor lies hundreds of feet below sea level.

Which cape on the Makah Reservation is the northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States?

Cape Flattery was described and named by James Cook in 1778, which makes it the oldest permanent non-Native place name in Washington.

Which Washington community, cut off by the 49th parallel, can be reached by road only through another country?

Point Roberts sits on the tip of a peninsula that dips just below the border agreed in 1846, leaving its residents a 25-mile drive across foreign soil from the rest of their state.

Which trophy did the Seattle Metropolitans win in 1917, making them the first American team ever to claim it?

Stanley Cup glory came with a win over the Montreal Canadiens, and Seattle reached the final again in 1919, a series abandoned with the teams level because of the flu pandemic.

Washington's unofficial motto, Alki, first seen on the territorial seal, is a Chinook Jargon word meaning what?

By and by was a promise: the settlers who landed at Seattle's Alki Point in 1851 called their six-block settlement New York Alki.

Pullman, home of Washington State University, hosts a national festival each year honouring which legume?

Lentils star in the festival's free bowls of chili, and the event has celebrated them since 1989 as a signature crop of the surrounding Palouse hills.

A world-record 95 feet of snow fell in the 1998–99 season at a ski area named after which Cascade volcano?

Mount Baker's ski area, about 50 miles east of Bellingham, logged 1,140 inches that winter and averages 641 inches a year, among the highest of any resort in the world.

Which 1914 Seattle skyscraper, built for a typewriter magnate, was long the tallest building west of the Mississippi?

Smith Tower was made far taller on the advice of the magnate's son, who wanted to take the regional height record away from a building in rival Tacoma.

Which London-based fur-trading firm built Fort Vancouver in 1824 as its headquarters in present-day Washington?

Hudson's Bay Company put John McLoughlin in charge for nearly 22 years, and he was later hailed as Oregon's founding figure for letting American settlers into the region.

Washington's official state ship, the Lady Washington, played HMS Interceptor in which 2003 seafaring film?

Pirates of the Caribbean was not the brig's only screen role: about a decade earlier it sailed as a namesake of the starship Enterprise in a Star Trek film.