Stevenson: County Seat on the Gorge

Stevenson, Washington sits on the north bank of the Columbia in the shadow of the Gorge's basalt walls. The town takes its name from George H. Stevenson, a Missouri-born settler whose family homesteaded here in the eighteen seventies and eighties.

In eighteen ninety-three the Stevenson Land Company purchased the original town site for twenty-four thousand dollars and laid out streets along the lower flat near the river. That same year Stevenson became the seat of Skamania County. It was incorporated in December of nineteen-oh-seven.

For most of the twentieth century the local economy ran on timber and logging. Then in nineteen eighty-six Congress created the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, protecting more than eighty miles of the river, and Stevenson gradually reinvented itself as a destination for hikers, windsurfers, and visitors drawn to the canyon's impossible scenery.