Centralia: The City George Washington Built

There is a statue of George Washington in the center of Centralia, but it does not depict the first president. It honors a man born into slavery in Virginia in eighteen seventeen, who crossed the continent, broke through legal barriers at every turn, and built the largest city in the Pacific Northwest ever founded by a Black American.

George Washington, born to an enslaved father who was sold away from him in infancy, was adopted by a white family named Cochran and raised in Missouri. As an adult he tried to claim land in Missouri, then Illinois, running into discriminatory laws at every stop. He joined the Oregon Trail migration in the early eighteen fifties, crossed the mountains, and settled in what is now southwest Washington, filing a donation land claim at the junction of the Skookumchuck and Chehalis rivers.

Then the Northern Pacific Railroad entered the picture. In eighteen seventy-two, surveyors ran the line directly through Washington's property. He saw the opportunity immediately. On January eighth, eighteen seventy-five, Washington and his wife Mary Jane filed the plat for a town they called Centerville, placing it astride the new rail corridor. He donated land for a park, a cemetery, and a Baptist church. By around eighteen eighty-six, the town was renamed Centralia, suggested by a settler from Centralia, Illinois.

The town grew fast. Washington became a prominent and well-regarded businessman, extending credit to struggling settlers during the economic panics of the eighteen eighties and nineties. When he died on August twenty-sixth, nineteen oh five, the mayor declared a day of mourning and ordered all businesses closed. His funeral at the Baptist church he had endowed was, by most accounts, the largest gathering Centralia had ever seen.

The city he platted now anchors Lewis County. Drive through and look for the statue: a Black man in pioneer dress, the founder who saw a railroad and turned it into a legacy.