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This story was originally published at HistoryLink.org. Subscribe to their weekly newsletter.

Looking Back at Our Past

This week HistoryLink celebrates our 20th anniversary with a look at our own history of the online encyclopedia of Washington history. This website debuted on January 15, 1999, at the Seattle Center’s annual Martin Luther King Day celebration, where curious passersby marveled at this new online resource. At the time, HistoryLink’s databases contained 300 or so essays pertaining to Seattle and King County history, all written expressly for the Internet. Twenty years later, we now offer close to 7,500 articles relating to Washington state history, and that number continues to grow.

Conceived by Walt Crowley and Paul Dorpat, HistoryLink might have been a book had it not been for Marie McCaffrey — now HistoryLink’s Executive Director — who in 1997 suggested that the encyclopedia would better serve the public as a free online resource instead. A prototype website was launched in 1998, while Crowley raised money and gathered together a core staff of writers and web experts, some of whom still work on the site.

Traffic grew quickly following the launch, but a historic event later that year pushed our servers to the limit. In preparation for the upcoming WTO conference, we placed a webcam in the window of our office — then at the Joshua Green building — overlooking Westlake Center. As chance would have it, protests and police action unfolded right in front of our WTO-cam. At one point, when news cameras were pushed back beyond the line of sight, we were the only live feed coming out of downtown. The world watched history happen through the eyes of HistoryLink.

Looking Forward to the Future

Once the dust settled, people who discovered HistoryLink found a reason to keep coming back as new articles were being added weekly, covering many aspects of local history from yesterday to years gone past. Educators and students were using the site to a great degree, so much so that our traffic used to drop every summer and climb steeply again in the fall. HistoryLink.org was proving so successful as a record of Seattle and King County history that in 2003 we expanded our reach and began documenting the history of the entire state.

And while the Internet has evolved greatly over the past two decades, so has HistoryLink. In the early days the images that accompany our articles were kept small due to bandwidth limitations, but our ongoing project to “Make the Pictures Bigger” has already resulted in the addition of thousands of larger images for easier viewing. HistoryLink was also designed at a time before mobile devices became popular, and in 2016 we redesigned the site so that it could be better viewed on smartphones and tablets. We’ve also expanded into using social media — another phrase you didn’t hear much in 1999 — and as part of our 20th anniversary celebration we’ve been posting some of our most popular articles by topic on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

As HistoryLink celebrates its first 20 years online, we raise our glass to you, our readers. Without your support, your visits, your feedback, and — hopefully and most importantly — your satisfaction, none of this would be possible. We’re glad you’ve enjoyed the past 20 years of HistoryLink.org as much as we have, and we look forward to the next 20 years and beyond.

NEWS THEN, HISTORY NOW

Cathedral Dedication

On January 23, 1851, Bishop Augustine Blanchet dedicated St. James Cathedralon land adjacent to Fort Vancouver. In 1885 a new St. James Cathedral was completed in the city of Vancouver. It served as the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Washington for more than two decades, until Bishop Edward J. O’Dea moved the diocese to Seattle.

Tribal Reservation

On January 20, 1857, President Franklin Pierce signed an executive order that established the Muckleshoot Reservation along the White River near the city of Auburn. The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is composed of descendants of the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup people who have inhabited the region surrounding the White and Green rivers for thousands of years.

County Demarcation

On January 21, 1865, Yakima Countywas established by the territorial legislature, two days after it erased Skamania County during the same session. Skamania’s boundaries were restored two years later.