Thurston County

Thurston County covers 719 square miles at the head of Budd Inlet located at the southern tip of Puget Sound.

At the Cowlitz convention in 1851, delegates from the Oregon Territory north of the Columbia River — besides petitioning for a new territory — also asked for a new county to be called “Simmons” in the area then known as Lewis County. The Oregon Territorial Legislature acted on the matter by amended the bill at the request of Michael T. Simmons to memorialize Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon’s first territorial delegate to Congress. Thurston County was created on January 12, 1852. Oregon then encompasses what is now Washington.

Thurston was a native of Maine, born in 1816. He attended Maine Weslyan Seminary, Dartmouth and in 1854, graduated from Bowdoin College. He later read law and was admitted to the Maine bar. After he settled for a time in Iowa, Thurston arrived in Oregon in 1847 and began his political life.

With the creation of Oregon Territory in 1849, Thurston was elected its first delegate to Congress. He was an ambitious delegate pushing through the Donation Land Claim Law, working to establish mail routes and post offices, lighthouses and procuring a pension for 1812 War veterans, many of whom settled in the territory. He was an eloquent speaker and was tireless in his promotion of Oregon Territory. On his voyage home in 1851 across the Isthmus of Panama, Thurston — just 35 years old — contracted a fever. He died on the steamer California near Acapulco and was buried there. He was later reinterred in Salem, Oregon.

The boundaries of the new county encompassed much of what is now Western Washington, reaching from Willapa Bay northward to the Canadian border and from the Pacific Ocean to the summit of the Cascades.

In late 1852, Jefferson, Pierce, and King counties were carved out of Thurston County, and the final boundaries were set in 1877.