Lakewood: From Hudson's Bay Post to Pierce County's Largest City
Near Tacoma, Washington
The prairie dotted with small lakes south of Tacoma has been occupied continuously for thousands of years. Nisqually and Steilacoom peoples managed this landscape long before Europeans arrived. In eighteen thirty-three, the British Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Nisqually here, one of the first European settlements north of the Columbia River, though the company's own Northwest headquarters was at Fort Vancouver, not here.
After the eighteen forty-six treaty set the border at the forty-ninth parallel, American settlers pressed in, and the United States eventually paid the Hudson's Bay Company four hundred sixty thousand dollars to buy out its land claims in eighteen sixty-nine. The fort closed, mills opened along the lakes and streams, and quiet suburban growth followed over the next century. Lakewood only incorporated as a city in nineteen ninety-six, but the ground beneath it carries one of the longer histories in the entire Pacific Northwest.
