#history

A 1876 article from the Washington Standard introducing the Skagit River to the rest of the state noted that, “The peculiar nature of the river is the Jam, about two miles above Skagit City.”  This snippet understates the obstructions and impact they had on life in town.  There were actually two immense log jams that meant, Jo says, “life and death” to the community.  The older of the two, just below present-day Mount Vernon, was roughly a half mile long, and so dense it had trees 10- to 12-inches in diameter growing out of it.  Reliable estimates pegged its age at around 100 years old.  The second jam, about a half mile upriver from the first, was even larger.  Both jams consisted of several layers of driftwood and debris 30-40 feet deep.

The Kirkland Cannery Building, also once called King County Food Processing Plant and State Cannery Number 4, is a historic building in Kirkland, Washington. It is an 11,000 ft2 cannery, built in 1936 by President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), and was sold to the City of Kirkland in 1941 for $44.79.[1][2] It was operated as a cooperative to benefit the poor during the Great Depression, along with three other WPA plants at Kent, Wapato, and Wenatchee.[3] Citizens could bring in crops, fish, and chicken, to be canned at no charge in exchange for donating one third of the product to "state institutions".[4] During World War II, it "was largely as an aid to the general food conservation program and the war effort rather than as an economic aid to the communities served".

phrase "speak softly and carry a big stick" became a common expression after U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt first publicly used it in a 1901 speech. There was a bit more to the full statement Roosevelt used in his speech