Everett (; ) is the county seat and largest city of Snohomish County, Washington, United States. It is north of Seattle and is one of the main cities in the metropolitan area and the Puget Sound region. Everett is the seventh-largest city in the state by population, with 110,629 residents as of the 2020 census. The city is primarily situated on a peninsula at the mouth of the Snohomish River along Port Gardner Bay, an inlet of Possession Sound (itself part of Puget Sound), and extends to the south and west.
The Port Gardner Peninsula has been inhabited by the Snohomish people for thousands of years, who had a winter village named near the mouth of the river. Modern settlement in the area began with loggers and homesteaders arriving in the 1860s, but plans to build a city were not conceived until 1890. A consortium of East Coast investors seeking to build a major industrial city acquired land in the area and filed a plat for "Everett", which they named in honor of Everett Colby, the son of investor Charles L. Colby. The city was incorporated in 1893, shortly after the arrival of the Great Northern Railway, and prospered as a major lumber center with several large sawmills. Everett became the county seat in 1897 after a dispute with Snohomish contested over several elections and a Supreme Court case. The city was the site of labor unrest during the 1910s, which culminated in the Everett massacre in 1916 that killed several members of the Industrial Workers of the World.
The area was connected by new interurban railways and highway bridges in the 1920s, transforming it into a major commercial hub, and gained an airport at Paine Field in 1936. The city's economy transitioned away from lumber and towards aerospace after World War II, with the construction of Boeing's aircraft assembly plant at Paine Field in 1967. Boeing's presence brought additional industrial and commercial development to Everett, as well as new residential neighborhoods to the south and west of the peninsula that was annexed by the city. Boeing remains the city's largest employer, alongside the U.S. Navy, which has operated Naval Station Everett since 1994.
Everett remains a major employment center for Snohomish County, but has also become a bedroom community for Seattle in recent decades. It is connected to Seattle by Interstate 5 and various public transit services at Everett Station, including the Sounder commuter train, Amtrak, and commuter buses. Everett stages several annual festivals and is also home to minor league sports teams, including the Everett Silvertips at Angel of the Winds Arena and Everett Aquasox at Funko Field.
History
Early history and settlement
The Port Gardner Peninsula has been 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 traditionally lived around local waterways in the Possession Sound estuary and had a fortified winter village at (Preston Point), at the mouth of the Snohomish River. In Lushootseed, the modern city of Everett is known as dᶻəɬigʷəd.
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 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.