- 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.
They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four