Local Community Colleges in Washington

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Olympia, Washington

Olympia is the capital of the state of Washington, USA. It has 52,555 residents (U.S. Census, 2018) and is part of a larger metropolitan area Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater (metropolitan area) with about 286,000 residents. The city is located on Budd Inlet at the south end of Puget Sound, at the outlet of the Deschutes River and at Capitol Lake about 100 miles southwest of Seattle.

The name is after the view of the Olympic Mountains on the peninsula of the Olympic Peninsula in the northwest.

Population

83.7 percent of the population is white, 6.0 percent are Asians, 2.0 percent are African-American, and 1.1 percent are descendants of North American Indigenous peoples. The city has had an increasing population except for a decline between 1890 and 1900.

Economics and culture

Many are employed in state and local government, health care and retail. In the past, the timber and canning industry was of great importance.

Olympia has one university (Saint Martin's University) and two colleges (The Evergreen State College and South Puget Sound Community College).

The city is a regional arts and music center, including the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, with exhibitions and concerts. Arts Walk is held twice a year, one of them at the procession of the Species parade in April. The city has several theaters, including the Capitol Theater of the Olympia Film Society (OFS), which hosts annual film festivals. There are public exhibitions with installations and sculptures, including at the State Capitol Campus and at Percival Landing in the harbor area. The Olympia Farmers Market is open every Saturday and Sunday almost all year.

History

North American coastal tribes lived in the area for thousands of years before Peter Puget and the British Vancouver Expedition arrived as the first Europeans to the area in 1792. An American expedition arrived in 1841. The first American settlers, Levi Lathrop Smith and Edmund Sylvester, settled down there five years later and named the place Smithster, later Smithfield, after themselves. Sylvester is considered the founder of the city in 1851, and Olympia became a new city name that year. The first customs house at Puget Sound was erected in Olympia, which in 1853 became the provisional capital of the newly created Washington Territory.

The city's development, including with a no longer existing Chinese district, grew in the 1850s with shops, hotels, dry docks and boatbuilding. Olympia was incorporated as a city in 1859. The same year, the area began to enter the small steamship fleet Puget Sound mosquito fleet. Olympia became the capital of Washington state in 1889.

The first capitol building opened in 1893. The city grew, including an opera house, tram lines, a new hotel and street lighting. In 1911–1912, the city center was expanded by several quarters, and a deep-water port was constructed.

Olympia's population and economy grew as the city became a center for lumber processing during the First World War. Residential areas were built south and west of the city. The Washington State Capitol, which is a complex of buildings, was completed in 1928. In the city's downtown area, many historic buildings were destroyed by a 1949 earthquake.

Since the 1960s, Olympia's port area has lost a lot of industry, such as sawmill, plywood manufacturing and shipbuilding. In the 1960s, several malls opened in Olympia. A storm destroyed and damaged several buildings in 1962. Parts of Olympia were hit by earthquakes in 1965 and 2001 as well.