George, Washington: The Only Town That Is Also a Presidential Full Name

The small community you are passing holds a distinction that no other town in the United States can claim: its full name is also the full name of the first President of the United States. Welcome to George, Washington.

The story starts in the early nineteen fifties, when a pharmacist from nearby Quincy named Charlie Brown placed the winning bid at a federal land auction, three hundred thirty-nine acres managed by the Bureau of Reclamation, sold for one hundred thousand dollars. Brown's idea was to develop a planned community on the Columbia Basin plateau, land that had only recently become farmable thanks to the Columbia Basin Project and its network of irrigation canals.

A Bureau of Reclamation official noted that Washington was the only state where a town could legitimately carry the full name of the first president. Brown embraced the idea immediately. He platted the streets, ran in water lines, built a truck stop he called the Martha Inn, and sold pie-shaped lots to settlers. The town was dedicated on July fourth, nineteen fifty-seven, and officially incorporated later that same year, on November fourth, at a ceremony that featured a thousand-pound cherry pie.

The streets were named after varieties of cherries: Bing, Lambert, Royal Anne, Windsor, Nanking. The main road was named Montmorency, the sour cherry variety that, according to legend, was the type of tree the young George Washington chopped down and confessed to his father. The town leans into its identity with unabashed enthusiasm. A large bronze bust of Washington commands the main intersection.

Today George, Washington, is a town of around five hundred residents, most earning their living from the surrounding agricultural operations, apples, potatoes, wheat. Every Fourth of July, the Gorge Amphitheatre nearby draws tens of thousands of concertgoers. George, Washington, remains entirely unfazed by any of it.