First Protestant Church North of the Columbia

In eighteen fifty-three, a minister named John F. DeVore raised the first Protestant church building north of the Columbia River on this ground in what is now the Tacoma area. The region had only just become its own territory, carved from Oregon Territory in March of that same year.

DeVore and his co-workers built not just a house of worship but an anchor for a scattered settler community spread across the dense evergreen landscape. The Washington State Historical Society placed a monument here to mark the site, recognizing that the building itself was long gone by the time the society got around to commemorating it in the early nineteen hundreds. That gap between the act and its recognition is its own small story of how quickly the frontier moved and how slowly memory catches up.