The name Snohomish City was first used on the 1871 plat that joined western and eastern claims at Union Avenue, then three blocks long. The City of Snohomish is still a small town of 9,000 residents, picturesquely sited on the gentle slope of the north bank of the river after which it was named. The Snohomish River, flowing northwest, begins six miles upstream at the confluence of the Snoqualmie and Skykomish Rivers, near where Monroe is today, and ends some 12 miles downstream when it empties into Port Gardner Bay, part of Puget Sound, between Everett and Marysville.
The frontier entrepreneurial spirit and the promise of government spending motivated the filing of claims on both sides of the Snohomish River in 1859 with the speculation that traffic on a new military road heading north would pay handsomely for a ferry crossing service. It was not to be. Instead, a steady increase in steamship service brought loggers and supplies to camps up and down the river, then family farmers following talk of the rich bottomland of the valley, and Snohomish grew to become the economic and cultural center of the county
Birthplace of the county and its home for 36 years, Snohomish City lost the county seat to the big spender Everett in 1897. The handsome courthouse became the high school, and it filled with the sounds of bells and laughter that it had never heard before. Since 1972, the historic downtown business district, along with several residential blocks, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And the Snohomish River continues to rise and fall with phases of the moon and drainage of the North Cascade Mountain Range sixty miles to the east, just as each new generation comes to understand the river as the gift of nature that created the city of Snohomish.
?Snoh-omish-(sdhub_, possibly related to the Lushootseed language word for man, stub_), the ?omish suffix mean people. ?(Tulalip Tribes)
