While I was getting my hair cut a couple of weeks ago, I glanced at the stylist's license from the State of Washington and suddenly started wondering how Washington state got its name. I found a great history of the name in this article. It turns out that the original proposal was to name the state Columbia (after the river that separates Oregon and Washington), but a representative from Kentucky stuck his nose in the statehood proceedings and wanted to honor George Washington by naming a state after him. Despite objections, the House of Representatives substituted "Washington" for "Columbia" in the bill and passed it.
While searching for this info, I also ran across the very interesting Washington Place Name database, put together by the former managing librarian of the Tacoma public library. It contains short summaries about the origin and history of local place names. The database setup is nasty (why do people still insist on exposing "DB sessions" to end users?) so you can't link to entries directly, but it's worth checking out.
Comments