- Brighton Beach is a neighborhood on Lake Washington in southeast Seattle. It is just south of the Bailey Peninsula (home to Seward Park) and extends from the lake over Graham Hill, across the Rainier Valley, and up the side of Beacon Hill, generally between S Othello Street on the south and S Orcas Street on the north. English immigrants who purchased lots there in the 1880s named the neighborhood for a resort town in England. Before that the area had been home to Duwamish Indians who had a village called hah-HAO-hlch (“forbidden place”) just south of Bailey Peninsula, and then to settlers who logged the huge trees, built farms, orchards, and a schoolhouse, and platted house lots.
- Seattle — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Seattle is the largest city in Washington state and its economic capital. Settled in 1851, its deep harbor and acquisition of Puget Sound’s first steam-powered sawmill quickly established it as a center of trade and industry. It gained the Territorial University (now University of Washington) in 1861, but was snubbed by the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1874 when it picked Tacoma as its western terminus. Despite this, the town prospered thanks to independent railroad development fueled by local coal deposits…