A Short Issaquah History
This article was featured on the Issaquah Online web site in 1996, having earlier appeared in the Issaquah Press.

Often, one of the first things people ask about Issaquah is what the name means.

Even the most knowledgeable people about the region's history may hem and haw before muttering that no one is really sure.

There is no real agreement among historians on the definition. They only know the word "Issaquah" is Indian in origin and might mean something about a bird, a snake, or maybe a river.

It seems to be one of the only pieces of history that is missing. The Issaquah area is loaded with a rich history varied with Native American tradition, coal mining and farming.

The valley in which the native Snoqualmie Tribe hunted and fished saw its first white settlers in the mid-1800s. Over the next 20 years, as land was cleared and fertile soil turned, the valley's dominant crop was hops, picked by Asian and Indian laborers and used to make beer in Seattle's breweries.

White families really began settling in the valley in the 1860s. James and Martha Bush are considered the founding father and mother of this area, and have countless descendants here.

Flat fertile farmland drew people to the area, but it was old King Coal that made the sleepy valley boom into a commercial town.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed William Pickering fifth territorial governor of Washington. Pickering located in the valley four years later and purchased 320 acres, which are now covered by Interstate 90 and retail centers. William Pickering Jr. ran a dairy farm in the Pickering Barn, built in 1878, which today is listed as a nationally registered historic structure. Robert Pickering, William Jr.'s grandson, sold the land in 1975 but continued to operate the dairy farm until 1985.

The town's first growth wave occurred in the 1870s, when miners flocked here to pick coal from rich seams buried beneath the foothills. With the arrival of coal mining, saloons, hardware stores, boarding houses and shoe stores cropped up along Issaquah's dirt streets.

L.B. Andrews filed the first coal claim in 1862, but getting coal out of the valley was hard. Most of the time it was barged down Lake Sammamish, up to Lake Washington near Bothell, then southward to the Black River connection in Renton before it even got near the Port of Seattle.

The coal industry lagged until the late 1880s when the arrival of the railroad and the formation of the Seattle Coal and Iron Company made mining a big-time operation.

Men were needed to work the mines that crisscrossed the Grand Ridge area, Squak Mountain and Newcastle on Cougar Mountain. Immigrants from many nations poured into the area to fill those back-breaking jobs.

Fathers and sons often came first, making the circuit from Newcastle, to Issaquah, to Ravensdale, to Black Diamond, and back again. When enough money was saved, the women and children were sent for in the old county.

While Englishmen, Italians, Yugoslavians and Czechs worked underground, their Northern European cousins were tramping the nearby woods felling trees and establishing saw mills. Today, Monohon and High Point are all but gone, but once they were thriving mill towns along with Preston.

Logging attracted Swedes, Norwegians, and a few Danes. Up until the early 1930s, Swedish was the common language everywhere in High Point except for the elementary school.

By 1900, the greater Issaquah area was one big melting pot that melded together with every marriage.

Coal mining began dwindling and finally shut down in the 1930s and 40s. Logging continued but also began to slow down during the Depression. Farming, especially dairying, was holding its own. So just before World War II, Issaquah seemed poised to die or thrive.

In the earliest times the area was not heavily populated, but used as a throughway for traveling over the mountains or south to the Cedar River. The Squak Valley and its surrounding hills have long had a special significance for Native American people.

There are said to be many spots on the Sammamish Plateau and on the three surrounding mountains that were considered holy, sacred or magical to these early people.

When white explorers and trappers arrived in the Pacific Northwest, the valley and lake were charted but still not settled. A Hudson Bay Company trapper's cabin existed in solitude for years at the south end of Lake Sammamish.

In the 1850s, the Snoqualmie Indians farming the fertile Snoqualmie Valley near Carnation fought a bloody battle with white men. Many of the Indian men were killed, and the women and children fled toward the safe haven of the Cedar River.

Some of those Snoqualmies found a safe and good life along the shores of Lake Sammamish. Most of them settled on the eastern shore, near today's Inglewood Hill Road, fishing, picking berries and working for the increasing number of white settlers.

The years after World War II were characterized less by the boom-and-bust cycle of the natural resource industry. Issaquah was seeing the slow evolution of a community. The town's population hovered around 1,000 until the late 1940s when the first bridge was built over Lake Washington.

That passage brought Seattle within easy driving distance and the town's transformation from an alpine enclave to a bedroom community began.

Issaquah had plenty of land, and developers soon platted tracts for the hillsides of Squak Mountain and parts of the Plateau.

As Seattle grew into a major metropolitan city, more and more businesses began looking for a different climate. Some wanted to escape skyscraper-high rents. Others did not want to subject their employees to traffic gridlock. And a few began to value the aesthetics of locating offices in scenic locations.

This prompted a boom of office construction on the east side of Lake Washington that continues today. The freeway access was also responsible for the housing boom on the Plateau. Klahanie was the first master-planned community approved by King County. When people began moving into that development in 1985, they were the advance guard of thousands of new families.

Growth in the greater Issaquah area has been phenomenal and it has created some growing pains. Traffic is thicker, schools are crowded and people seem to come and go a little faster. But the sense of community found here has so far weathered the development storm.