The Man Behind Issaquah -- George Washington Tibbetts Fathered All Sorts Of Businesses In The Eastside's Oldest City

Even as he was heading west, Gen. George Washington Tibbetts stopped midway through his trip to open a store and start a bank.

When this mover and shaker settled in what is now Issaquah, his new home felt the full power of his entrepreneurial spirit - in everything from a cross-Cascade highway to a single can of milk.

The Eastside's oldest incorporated city was built on a combination of commerce, agriculture and location. Hops, dairy farms, mining and lumber were all big businesses for Issaquah, and its location, roughly halfway between the Cascades and Seattle, made it a stopping point on westward routes.

Behind development and innovations in nearly all these areas was Tibbetts - planning, growing, building and selling, and in the process helping to create a city.

The adventurous Maine native left home at age 16, heading west after serving in the Civil War. He stopped for a few years in Missouri, where he farmed, started a couple of businesses and married Rebecca Wilson.

The young couple homesteaded for a year in Oregon, where they lost two babies in two days, before moving to the Squak Valley in the early 1870s.

When they arrived, the fertile land between what are now Lake Sammamish and the Issaquah Alps was still very much a wild place. It was known then as Squak, a corruption of the Native-American name for the area, Ishquoh. In 1870, the town had only about 30 white residents.

Among these was one of Issaquah's most important settlers - William Pickering, a territorial governor appointed by Abraham Lincoln. The Tibbetts family stayed on Pickering's sprawling property while their home was being built.

Like Pickering, Tibbetts became active in early Washington government, serving as a territorial legislator in the 1870s and framer of the state constitution in the 1880s. As a state legislator, he drafted and pushed through a bill for a Snoqualmie Pass highway, the first over the Cascades.

But these two were extraordinary in their pursuits: For most Squak pioneers at that time, life revolved around coal and hops, and Tibbetts soon became involved in the latter, buying plants from Puyallup's Ezra Meeker and growing them on his 160-acre ranch near Lake Sammamish.

At that time, hops farmers hired Native Americans and whites to pick the plants, which then were dried and baled in tall hop houses. When Chinese laborers left Seattle to work in Squak hop fields, the local workers united to keep this new labor force out.

The whites and Indians chased away about 30 Chinese people at gunpoint before the workers even entered the valley, and killed and wounded others who had set up camp.

But neither the laborers nor the farm owners could do anything about the two forces that would destroy the business at the turn of the century: hop lice and Eastern Washington competition.

Tibbetts, however, continued to prosper. Along with the family home, Tibbetts had built a store, stage house and a hotel.

These almost instantly became the commercial heart of the growing settlement, as well as its social center. Cross-Cascade travelers stayed overnight at the well-known "halfway house," and locals gathered to chat on the hotel's long porch and dance in its ballroom.

The kindness Tibbetts and his wife showed to travelers was legendary: During the winter, the couple sent wagons up the pass to make sure no one was stranded.

The hotel was popular mainly because it was a stop on the stage line Tibbetts established between Snoqualmie - where he built another store and a sawmill - and Newcastle, the "black diamond" capital of King County.

The line was essential to Issaquah's development, serving as a major means of ground transportation before the railroad came to town.

In 1888, the year the railroad in Issaquah was completed, Tibbetts became Washington's representative to the national Republican convention.

He also served locally, as postmaster in the mid-1870s and '80s.

Fortunately for him, he had stepped down by 1892, when the town's

incorporation as Gilman led to lost mail. The trouble was that there already was a Gilmer in Klickitat County, so Gilman adopted a different name - Olney - for its post office. The two names were a source of frustration for the townspeople in Gilman, who successfully petitioned Olympia for a name change. The city became Issaquah in 1899.

During these years, Tibbetts' retirement as postmaster seemed like the only thing that went right for him: The panic of 1893 wiped out most of his businesses and possessions. He already was frail, and the stress nearly took his life.

Around 1900, a fire swept away Tibbetts' hotel and store on his ranch, just as local hops farming collapsed completely.

But Tibbetts, then about 55, recovered. He built yet another store, which soon was thriving. By then, Issaquah's commercial hub had shifted from his ranch to its present site on Front Street.

As usual, Tibbetts did not stop with only one venture. Logging came to Issaquah around 1903, and the old-growth trees that were cleared revealed excellent pastures for cows.

The dairy business took off. The Darigold creamery went up in 1909, and the Pickering family ran a massive dairy operation with the still-standing Pickering Barn as its centerpiece.

But it was Tibbetts who shipped the first can of milk from Issaquah to Seattle, establishing the little town as a major supplier to the big city. Soon, dairymen were loading up to 125 cans of milk each morning onto the train.

By the time Tibbetts died in 1924, many of the industries that had shaped Issaquah - hops, mining, lumber, dairy - were gone or on the decline. But the city had taken root.

Other innovators played key roles in founding Issaquah: Daniel Gilman brought the railroad; L.B. Andrews developed the first mine; W.W. Sylvester founded the Issaquah Bank.

But in a city put together from so many pieces, only Tibbetts seemed to have a hand in nearly all of them. Today, he is regarded as the city's first entrepreneur and one of Washington's most esteemed pioneers.

Janet Burkitt's phone message number is 206-515-5689. Her e-mail address is: jburkitt@seattletimes.com

Sources include "The History of King County" by Clarence Bagley, "The Past at Present in Issaquah, Washington" by Edwards Fish, "Fire Rock: The Story of Issaquah's Coal Mining History" by Linda Adair Hjelm, "This Was Issaquah," compiled by Harriet Fish, and the Issaquah Press archives.