Smithfield to Olympia: How the Capital Got Its Name

In eighteen forty-six, two men filed adjoining land claims at the southern end of Puget Sound. One was Edmund Sylvester, a young Maine man who had come west by sea. The other was Levi Lathrop Smith. They planned to build a town together, and for a brief period the settlement went by the name Smithfield, in honor of Smith.

In eighteen forty-eight, while canoeing on the Deschutes River near Tumwater, Levi Smith had a seizure and drowned. He was the younger of the two partners. Sylvester buried him and became the sole owner of the claim. He went to the California gold fields, came back with little to show for it, and in January of eighteen fifty, he platted a town on the land and gave it a new name: Olympia. The name is generally credited to a suggestion by Colonel Isaac Ebey. The Olympic Mountains were visible across the water on clear days, their glaciated peaks rising above the Sound, and someone thought the mountains deserved a name carried down to the capital beneath them.

When the Washington Territory was formally organized in eighteen fifty-three, Isaac Stevens arrived as its first governor and confirmed Olympia as the territorial capital. The first territorial legislature convened in eighteen fifty-four in a dry-goods store on Main Street, the capitol building not yet finished. That improvised beginning suited a town that had been platted by a man who named it after a mountain range someone else could see from his window.

The capital it became. The mountains still stand.