The Port Gardner Peninsula was originally inhabited by local Coast Salish tribes who arrived in the region 10,000 years before present and settled near modern-day Everett approximately 2,000 years before present. The Snohomish people lived around local waterways in the Possession Sound estuary and had a fortified winter village at Hibulb (also called Hebolb) at the mouth of the Snohomish River. The first Europeans in the area were explorers from the 1792 Vancouver Expedition, who landed on a beach on the modern Everett waterfront and claimed the land for England on June 4, the birthday of King George III.Puget Sound was further explored and charted by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1824 and the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes in 1841, ahead of a larger American presence in the area.
The Snohomish and other Coast Salish tribes were signatories to the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855, which relinquished their lands to the Washington territorial government and established the nearby Tulalip Indian Reservation, where they would be relocated. The first permanent American settler to arrive on the peninsula was Dennis Brigham, a carpenter from Worcester, Massachusetts, who claimed a 160-acre (64.7 ha) homestead and built a cabin for himself. Several other families established their own homesteads, as well as a general store and a sawmill that quickly went out of business. Over the next several years a handful of loggers moved to the area, but plans for a settlement were not conceived until 1890.
During an Alaskan cruise via the Inside Passage aboard the steamship Queen of the Pacific in July 1890, lumberman Henry Hewitt Jr. and railroad executive Charles L. Colby drew up plans for an industrial city on Port Gardner Bay. Hewitt and Colby had previously met in Wisconsin, where they operated lumber and maritime businesses, respectively, and in Tacoma, Washington, from which the voyage began. The pair sought to build an industrial center at a site they speculated would be the first ocean port for Great Northern Railway, to be constructed by James J. Hill, and turn it into a “Pittsburgh of the West”. On August 22, 1890, the plat for a 50-acre (20 ha) townsite on the peninsula was filed by the Rucker Brothers, who had moved north from Tacoma and had more modest plans for the area.
By September, Colby had secured $800,000 in funding (equivalent to $21.6 million in 2020 dollars) from oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and his railroad associate Colgate Hoyt to begin acquiring land while avoiding property speculators. The Hewitt–Colby syndicate decided to use a name that would not identify a specific location, naming their planned city after Everett Colby, the fifteen-year-old son of investor Charles L. Colby, who had displayed a “prodigious appetite” at a group dinner. The Everett Land Company was incorporated in Pierce County on November 19, 1890, and acquired 434.15 acres (175.69 ha) of property from the Rucker Brothers a week later. Several businesses had already been established on the peninsula, generally dividing themselves between the Bayside facing Port Gardner and Riverside facing the Snohomish River. The Rucker Brothers’ plat was withdrawn after an agreement to donate half of their holdings was reached with Hewitt, who promised a series of industrial developments under the “Remarkable Document”, which was also used to acquire property from other landowners in the area.
Everett gained its first businesses in early 1891, as the new settlement on the Snohomish River attracted land speculators and commitments to build lumber mills and other industrial enterprises. The first post office opened in July at a general store on the bayfront, where the Seattle and Montana Railroad was built in October. By the end of the year, Everett had gained its first school, saloon, church, and sawmill. The Swalwell Brothers had begun selling property in Riverside along Hewitt Avenue, which was laid 100 feet (30 m) wide and became the main east–west thoroughfare from the riverfront when it was completed in June 1892. The Everett Land Company did not initially organize a municipal government, leaving local issues to be resolved by a “citizen’s committee” formed by 21 residents on March 21, 1892. The area had an estimated population of 5,000 by the end of the year, shortly before the completion of the Great Northern Railway across Stevens Pass on January 6, 1893. The railroad did not terminate in Everett as originally hoped by land speculators, instead continuing along the shoreline of Puget Sound to Seattle.
Following the acquisition of tidelands on the waterfront, which had been in dispute, the Everett Land Company allowed for a municipal government to be formed. The initial city boundaries were set by the company to avoid taxing the industrial areas and exclude the town of Lowell, which predated Everett. On April 27, 1893, the citizens of Everett voted 670–99 in favor of incorporating as a city, and elected Thomas Dwyer as mayor. The incorporation was certified by the Snohomish County government on May 4, 1893. The city’s privately owned streetcar system launched on July 3, 1893, with lines connecting the Hewitt Avenue commercial district to mills, smelters, and areas as far as Lowell.
The Everett Land Company ran into financial trouble within months of the city’s incorporation as the impact of the Panic of 1893 was felt in the region. The company’s investment in the Monte Cristo area yielded ore of poorer quality than expected and it was unable to meet the promises in the “Remarkable Document”, which was amended several times with the Rucker Brothers, by then junior partners in the company. Rockefeller called his investment into question and appointed Frederick Gates to begin divestment while Colby and Hoyt remained as the leaders of the company. Several of the major businesses in Everett closed or failed during the three-year peak of the economic depression, but work on Alexander McDougall’s Whaleback was finished with the launch of SS City of Everett in October 1894, the largest to be built on Puget Sound at the time. The Everett Women’s Book Club was established in 1894 and opened the city’s first hospital and public library, which would later expand into the Everett Public Library system.
Despite the economic turmoil, Everett continued to grow with the addition of new businesses as the area’s lumber activities increased. Other industries also expanded in Everett, including a local cannery, a brick factory, and several ore smelters. The discovery of new mineral deposits in Monte Cristo fueled a population boom, along with the completion of the Everett and Monte Cristo Railway under the ownership of Rockefeller. The city also benefited from the Klondike Gold Rush, building several steamboats to transport prospectors and entrepreneurs.
In its early years, Everett launched a campaign to become county seat by replacing Snohomish, which had waned in importance following the completion of several railroads serving other cities in the county. An election to determine which city would be named county seat was scheduled for November 6, 1894, beginning a heated debate by citizens and newspapers. The initial count by the commissioners was announced on December 19 in Everett’s favor, amid accusations of fraud and bought votes from both sides. Following an appeal from Snohomish, the Washington Supreme Court declared the result to be invalid and blocked the move, but a recount by the commissioners in October 1895 remained in Everett’s favor. A long legal battle was fought between the two cities and was decided in October 1895 by the Supreme Court, who ruled that Everett would become county seat per the legal and binding recount. In January 1897, the county government’s records were moved by wagons from Snohomish to Everett, where a three-story courthouse was opened on February 1, 1898.
After outside investors withdrew their shares in the Everett Land Company, its holdings were transferred in 1899 to the Everett Improvement Company, controlled by James J. Hill and his trusted associate John T. McChesney.Friedrich Weyerhäuser acquired Hill’s timberland holdings in the Pacific Northwest and chose Everett for the site of his major lumber mill, which opened in 1902. By the end of the decade, Everett had 11 lumber mills, 16 shingle mills, and 17 combined mills—surpassing every other city in the state and earning it the nicknames of “Milltown” and the “City of Smokestacks”. The Weyerhaeuser Company opened its larger second mill, named Mill B, on the Snohomish River in April 1915 with a 203-foot (62 m) smokestack and the ability to process 1,000,000 board feet of timber.
The city gained its first interurban railway in 1903 with the opening of the Snohomish Interurban. This was followed by the Seattle Interurban on May 2, 1910, which ran hourly on an inland route via Alderwood Manor. Everett became a first-class city in 1907 and had a population of nearly 25,000 residents by 1910, a quarter of whom were foreign-born. The local lumber economy prospered during the rebuilding of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, which created a high demand for West Coast wood products. Everett itself suffered from a major fire on August 2, 1909, that destroyed 12 commercial buildings and the county courthouse. The city’s growth was not hindered by the fire and a new county courthouse opened in 1910 alongside the Everett High School campus. Everett voters approved a new city charter in 1912 that reorganized the city government into a three-commissioner council with a ceremonial mayor.
During the first decade of the 20th century, workers at mills and other factories began organizing labor unions under the Everett Central Trades Council, which had 27 member trades and six unions by 1901. The council had 25 unions by 1907 and became affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, using its influence to stage strikes and work stoppages that resulted in wage increases and safer conditions at mills, where 35 workers had died in 1909. Everett was also home to local socialist groups and organizers, who published the Labor Journal and The Commonwealth on a weekly basis until 1914. Several survivors of the September 1907 anti-Indian riots in Bellingham settled in Everett for two months, but were beaten and forcefully evicted by a mob.
The city’s labor unrest culminated in the Everett massacre on November 5, 1916, the deadliest event in Pacific Northwest labor history. A strike of shingle weavers began at local mills in May 1916 and continued for months with violent attacks from mill owners, which attracted attention from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical socialist union who provided speakers at Everett events. The city government passed a new ordinance to restrict street speaking as a result of tensions between the IWW and county sheriff Donald McRae, who armed a local militia and beat 41 union members who were attempting to enter the city by boat on October 30, 1916. The beatings drew anger from union members and other Everett citizens, prompting 300 IWW members to travel on the steamers Verona and Calista from Seattle to Everett on November 5, when they were confronted at the docks by McRae and his posse of 200 citizen deputies, who feared violence and arson from the group. After a heated debate followed by several minutes of gunfire, five people on the Verona were killed and two deputies on the dock had been mortally wounded from friendly fire; an unofficial death toll of twelve IWW members was determined from the recovery of underwater bodies. At least 50 people were injured, including McRae, and 297 were arrested in Everett and Seattle; only one IWW member, Thomas Tracy, was ultimately tried and found not guilty of first-degree murder after a two-month trial.
The shingle weavers strike ended on November 10, 1916, with no concessions from the mill owners, and local residents turned against the IWW for escalating the dispute. The labor tensions subsided with the entry of the U.S. into World War I, despite an attempted comeback by the IWW in disrupting logging for the war effort. As a result of the massacre, the state government passed laws to prohibit citizens from advocating for anarchy or violent overthrow, which were not repealed until 1999. The massacre was largely unacknowledged by local residents until the late 20th century, when book accounts were published and a historic marker was installed overlooking the former docks.
The local timber industry continued its boom and bust cycle into the 1920s, suffering from price swings but benefiting from the 1923 Japanese earthquake to supply lumber and the opening of the Panama Canal. The Clough-Hartley shingle mill claimed to be the largest in the world, producing 1.5 million wood shingles per day; the city produced approximately 4.5 million shingles and 3.5 million board feet of lumber per day in 1920. The Port of Everett was created on July 13, 1918, to enable public ownership of the waterfront and promote economic development in the city. By the end of the 1920s, the port had opened the county’s first airport on Ebey Island and acquired the 14th Street Dock and Jetty Island from the Everett Improvement Company. The city also acquired the private water system in 1915 and replaced it with a new supply from the Sultan River basin that was fully activated four years later.
Everett’s central commercial district grew from a handful of businesses into a busy downtown during the 1920s, including the construction of several multi-story office and retail buildings, two junior high schools, a modern city hall, and additions to the city’s two hospitals. The six-story Monte Cristo Hotel opened in 1925 with 140 guest rooms, elaborate furnishings, and a banquet hall that would host civic functions for several decades. The county’s first radio station, KFBL (now KRKO), began broadcasting on August 25, 1922, and was among the earliest in the state. In 1924, a third mill at the Weyerhaeuser complex, which employed 1,500 people and contributed to $28.125 million (equivalent to $339 million in 2020 dollars) in annual timber output by the end of the decade.
The widespread adoption of the automobile lead to the construction of new roads out of Everett and Snohomish County to neighboring regions. The earliest iteration of the Stevens Pass Highway opened in 1925, providing the second automobile crossing of the Cascade Mountains in the state and access to new timberland and other resources. The highway was later improved with the opening of the Hewitt Avenue Trestle in 1939, crossing the Snohomish River and Ebey Island on an elevated viaduct. The Pacific Highway (part of U.S. Route 99) was completed in 1927 with the opening of four bridges across the Snohomish River delta to Marysville. Everett was also among the first cities in the U.S. to replace its streetcars with buses, doing so in 1923, and the last train on the Seattle–Everett Interurban ran on February 20, 1939.
Everett experienced a major rise in unemployment as demand for lumber products dropped, with an estimated 32 percent of property taxes left unpaid in 1932. Charitable organizations in the area set up relief programs and provided work for unemployed residents, including commencing work on a 185-acre (75 ha) park and golf course in North Everett that later became American Legion Memorial Park. The federal Works Progress Administration employed local workers to construct a new downtown public library, develop parks, expand schools, and improve streets. The works program also built a new county airport, later named Paine Field, that opened southwest of Everett in 1936 to serve commercial uses. The airport was appropriated for military use during World War II, but was later turned over to county ownership. The war also brought a new shipyard operated by the Everett-Pacific Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company, which employed 6,000 workers and closed in 1949.
Downtown Everett continued to grow as the regional commercial center following the end of the war, with four large department stores and dozens of smaller retailers and restaurants in a six-block radius of Hewitt Avenue and Colby Avenue. The population boom triggered construction of new housing areas around the peninsula and new schools, with enrollment in the Everett School District increasing from 6,000 in 1941 to 11,600 in 1951. The school district also built Everett Memorial Stadium in 1947 to host high school sports and civic events. A new public housing complex, Baker Heights, was built in 1943 to house military personnel amid a local shortage, providing 1,275 apartments that later went to low-income families.
The first suburban-style supermarket opened on Evergreen Way (part of U.S. Route 99) in 1950 and was followed by strip malls and similar big box stores along the highway by the end of the decade. The areas surrounding the highway were developed into suburban housing and made up the bulk of the city’s then-largest annexation, of 900 acres (360 ha) near Madison Street on December 31, 1959. A second round of South Everett annexations completed in 1961 and 1972 added 10,300 acres (4,200 ha) to the city, including the Lowell area, and boosted its population to over 50,000. Everett’s second high school, Cascade High School, opened in 1961 to serve the annexed areas. The new suburban neighborhoods were linked via Interstate 5, which opened from North Seattle to Everett in February 1965 and bypassed U.S. Route 99 with a six-lane freeway roughly following the former interurban railway. The freeway was extended around the east side of Downtown Everett in January 1968 and Interstate 5 was completed within Washington with the opening of the section connecting the city to Marysville in May 1969.
The Boeing Company opened its first Everett factory in 1943 as part of its wartime production for the B-17 program. The company moved to the Everett–Pacific Shipyard in 1956 and grew to be the city’s largest single employer by 1965, with 1,728 employees. Boeing approved early development of its Boeing 747 passenger jetliner in March 1966 and purchased 780 acres (320 ha) near Paine Field in June to build its assembly plant for the plane, which would become the world’s first “jumbo jet”. Work on the first 747 plane, named the “City of Everett”, began at the unfinished factory in January 1967. It was unveiled in September 1968 and made its maiden flight on February 9, 1969. The Everett factory was expanded several times to accommodate later Boeing programs, including the 767, 777, and 787 Dreamliner.
The impending construction of the Boeing plant triggered a new residential and commercial development in Everett and surrounding communities in the late 1960s. By the end of the decade, Everett had annexed additional areas to stretch the city boundaries west to Mukilteo and south to Silver Lake. A new freeway, State Route 526, was built to connect the plant to Interstate 5 at the Eastmont Interchange, where the Everett Mall was planned to be built. The mall was built in stages, beginning with a Sears store in February 1969 and ending with a grand opening on October 9, 1974, with 14 stores. The development of the mall was slowed by a local economic crash that began with the cancellation of Boeing’s supersonic jetliner program in 1971 and financial issues for airlines that affected sales of the Boeing 747. The Everett factory reduced its number of employees from 25,000 to 4,700, causing a spike in local unemployment rates and an exodus of former employees; the Everett School District closed three of its elementary schools as enrollment dropped by 3,000 students.
During the 1970s, several of Everett’s surviving lumber and pulp mills closed as they were too costly to renovate or replace, marking the end of the “Mill Town”. Lowell’s pulp mill closed in 1972 and was followed by Weyerhaeuser’s Mill B in 1979 and Mill A in 1981. The final Weyerhaeuser mill closed in 1992, leaving the Scott Paper Company as the last remaining paper mill in Everett until its closure in 2012. The city instead deepened its connections to the aerospace and high-tech industry, opening facilities in the 1980s for Hewlett-Packard, Fluke, and other electronics firms. Downtown Everett also declined as an activity center as retailers and car dealerships moved to suburban areas, despite the opening of a large hotel and several high-rise office building. A city landfill southeast of Downtown Everett was turned into a recycling plant for millions of rubber tires, nicknamed “Mount Firestone”, which caught fire in September 1984 and burned for seven months as the incident gained national media attention.
Boeing recovered from its sales slump and increased employment at its Everett plant to 18,000 people in 1980 as it prepared to unveil the Boeing 767, the second family of jetliners to be produced in Everett. A neighboring industrial park along Seaway Boulevard was developed in the 1980s as demand for commercial space in the city grew. The Port of Everett began developing a new shopping and retail complex on Port Gardner Bay as it looked to diversify away from industrial uses, but the project ran into financial issues as Everett-area employers failed or laid off workers amid an aerospace slump in 1981–82. The U.S. Navy selected the former shipyard site on Port Gardner Bay as the site of a new military base in 1984 under the Strategic Homeport program.Naval Station Everett and its 1,600-foot (490 m) pier were constructed between 1987 and 1994 alongside auxiliary facilities located to the north in Smokey Point. The first ships arrived in September 1994. Naval Station Everett was the long-term home of several aircraft carriers, including the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The city underwent an urban revival in the 1990s, fueled by the upcoming centennial celebrations and a third expansion of the Boeing plant for the Boeing 777 program. The plant expansion was completed in 1993, enlarging the world’s largest building by volume to 472,000,000 cubic feet (13,400,000 m) covering 96 acres (39 ha). Everett’s inner neighborhoods grew with new residential and commercial development, including Downtown Everett, where a beautification and restoration program had begun in the 1980s. The downtown program included a road diet for Colby Avenue, planter boxes on widened sidewalks, and new parks. Several new office buildings were completed in Downtown Everett, including the 11-story Everett Mutual Tower, and other historic buildings were renovated or restored. The city also annexed 465 acres (188 ha) near Paine Field in March 2000, bringing Everett’s population to over 91,000. Everett was recognized as an All-America City by the National Civic League in 2002 and has been a member of the Tree City USA program since 1993. The city’s Delta neighborhood underwent extensive environmental cleanup that began in the 2000s with funds from Asarco after the discovery of soil contamination from the shuttered smelter.
Everett was identified as a key transport hub under the regional Sound Transit system, which was approved in a ballot measure in 1996 after an earlier failed attempt. The transit agency opened a multimodal train and bus center, Everett Station, in February 2003 to replace scattered downtown facilities for Amtrak, Greyhound, and local transit. It would also serve as the northern terminus for Sounder commuter rail and Sound Transit Express buses, which both connect Everett to Seattle. A six-mile (9.7 km) section of Interstate 5 was rebuilt by the state government from 2005 to 2008 by adding new lanes and improving several interchanges at a cost of $263 million. Everett remains home to one of the most congested stretches of I-5, which is also among the worst in the United States for travel delays.
Downtown Everett remained a center for new development in the 2000s and 2010s, with several projects completed by local governments and private developers. The Everett Events Center (now Angels of the Winds Arena) opened in 2003 as an indoor sports venue, convention center, and community ice rink. The county government redeveloped its Everett office campus by building a new administrative center, jail, parking garage, and public plaza that opened in 2005. In the 2010s, two new downtown hotels were opened along with several apartment buildings that were encouraged by relaxed zoning policies. As the region’s homeless population grew, Everett added two supportive housing buildings in downtown to provide 150 units of low-income housing with access to social services.
Boeing selected Everett as the main site of its 787 Dreamliner and 747-8 programs, which did not require major building expansions. The company also partnered with the county government to create the Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour, an aviation museum at Paine Field that opened in 2005. The Boeing 777X program launched in 2013 with plans to build a wing assembly center adjacent to the Everett plant, which opened in 2016. Commercial passenger service at Paine Field resumed at a new terminal on March 4, 2019, after earlier plans from the 1980s onward were blocked by nearby residents.
The city government began planning for a major redevelopment of a former landfill on the Snohomish River waterfront in the late 1990s, but the project was stalled as private developers declined to move the project forward. The original concept for the 139-acre (56 ha) property was an entertainment center with shopping, housing, offices, and parks. The riverfront project was ultimately divided into three sections: a southern portion for 235 single-family homes that was constructed in 2016; a center portion with commercial space, apartments, a movie theater, and a small park; and a northern portion with 190 townhomes. A similar redevelopment plan for the Port of Everett’s 65 acres (26 ha) on the bayside waterfront, known as Port Gardner Wharf, was shelved in 2007 by the developer’s financial issues. A new development, named Waterfront Place, began construction in 2018 with a hotel, apartments, restaurants, and shops adjacent to the city’s public marina.
Providence Regional Medical Center, formed from a merger of Everett’s two hospitals in 1994, completed a major expansion of its North Everett campus in 2011 by opening a 12-story medical tower. The first U.S. case of coronavirus disease 2019 was identified in a Snohomish County resident at Providence Regional Medical Center on January 20, 2020. As the coronavirus pandemic worsened in the state, mayor Cassie Franklin declared the first shelter-in-place order for Washington state on March 21, 2020. In response to a projected revenue shortfall of $14 million caused by the shelter-in-place order, which later spread statewide, the city government laid off 160 employees in May 2020 and plans to cut services. The city’s original 2020 budget had already been constrained due to a projected deficit caused by a spending gap identified in 2017.
