Sammamish — Thumbnail History (historylink.org) Sammamish (King County) is located on a broad plateau about 14 air miles east of Seattle. Until the 1870s, the area was largely uninhabited by humans. In 1877 Martin Monohon became the first permanent non-Indian settler on the Sammamish Plateau, but for much of the next century the region was mostly woods, chicken farms, dairy farms, and lake resorts. Development began edging onto the plateau in the 1960s and accelerated in the final decades of the twentieth century, transforming the pleasant countryside into an affluent Seattle suburb. The city of Sammamish incorporated on August 31, 1999, and in recent years has twice been recognized by Money magazine as one of the best small towns in America to live in. The 2010 U.S. Census recorded Sammamish’s population as 45,780 and its land area as 18.2 square miles.