Burlington: Born at the Crossing of Two Railroads
Near Bellingham, Washington
Burlington began as a logging camp in the early eighteen eighties, and the town took off because two railroad lines crossed here. In eighteen ninety, the Great Northern Railway pushing north-south and the Seattle and Northern Railway pushing east-west both laid tracks through the flat bottomland of Skagit County, and their junction demanded a town. Within weeks the site was platted, and by January of eighteen ninety-one the plat was filed.
Settler T. W. Soule, a transplant from Vermont, named the place after his hometown of Burlington.
The little railroad junction grew into a dairy and tulip-bulb center for the Skagit Valley, incorporating in nineteen oh two. Today it is still the agricultural hub of the valley, best known each spring when the surrounding fields turn solid with color during the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.
