- Everson is located in the Nooksack River valley of northern Whatcom County, some 15 miles northeast of Bellingham. The site of a long-established village of the Nooksack Indian Tribe, the area saw settlement by pioneer homesteaders as early as 1858, during the Fraser River Gold Rush, when a community called The Crossing was established less than a mile west of present-day Everson. This settlement relocated east with the coming of the Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad in 1891, and Everson was platted not long after. The town was named for its first settler, who had homesteaded the site in 1871. In the early twentieth century, two industries were formed by local residents, both of which grew rapidly and provided employment for much of the population: a cannery and a condensery. They joined already burgeoning timber mills established in the late nineteenth century. The railroad made possible the widespread distribution of local fruit, vegetable, dairy, and wood products regionally, nationally, and internationally, and Everson industries thrived for generations. As of 2014, Everson retained its small-town features with a population of slightly more than 2,500, while still providing native as well as specialty produce to the wider region.
- Puerto Rico (Wikipedia)
Puerto Rico (Spanish for ‘rich port’; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a self-governing Caribbean archipelago and island organized as an unincorporated territory of the United States under the designation of commonwealth. Located about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southeast of Miami, Florida, between the Dominican Republic in the Greater Antilles and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Lesser Antilles, it consists of the eponymous main island and numerous smaller islands, including Vieques, Culebra, and Mona. With approximately 3.2 million residents, it is divided into 78 municipalities, of which the most populous is the capital municipality of San Juan, followed by those within the San Juan metropolitan area. Spanish and English are the official languages of the government, though Spanish predominates.