- Lewis County — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Lewis County in southwest Washington can truly be called the “mother of counties.” Half of the present-day Washington and of British Columbia were carved from its original borders. But the county’s location astride the Cowlitz Trail between the Columbia River and Puget Sound meant that communities with good water access would develop first. The construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s and innovations in logging technology were the major spurs to settlement.
- Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of Geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.