City Of Pasco history

John Commingers AinsworthIn 1850, John Commingers Ainsworth arrived at Great Forks.

When the Northern Pacific Railway made plans in 1879 to push through a line from Spokane to Portland, it platted the town of Ainsworth at the Snake's mouth to serve as a railroad construction camp.

Established on the site of a prehistoric Indian village in 1880, when the Northern Pacific Railway (now Burlington Northern Sante Fe) reached that point, it was named by a railroad surveyor for Cerro de Pasco, Peru, where he had previously worked.

By 1881, Ainsworth had earned a reputation as a wild and lawless boomtown.

In 1882, Ainsworth's railroad engineers went to work building a bridge across the Snake near the mouth.

Once the bridge was completed on April 20, 1884, the boom town of Ainsworth stopped booming.

Many of the buildings in Ainsworth were dismantled and moved to this new village by February 1885.

Two steamboats were built in Pasco in 1888, which plied their trade up and down the Columbia and the Snake.

Pasco, city, seat (1889) of Franklin county, southeastern Washington, United States, situated at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers, opposite Kennewick and immediately southeast of Richland.

On September 3, 1891 Pasco was officially incorporated.

Those irrigation projects were agonizingly slow to be completed, but by 1910 vast acres of the surrounding shrub-steppe landscape were covered with green farms and orchards.

Northern Pacific map of line through Pasco and Kennewick (detail), 1915

In 1922, a bridge was completed over the Columbia, connecting Pasco and Kennewick for the first time.

Pasco grew to be a vital railroad town in the years before World War II, including what is considered the first scheduled flight of United Airlines in 1926.

The Port of Pasco is a local municipal corporation established by the voters of Franklin County in 1940.

Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and almost immediately, Pasco was jammed with bulldozers, cranes, and men in uniform.

In 1943, the Hanford Engineering Project caused both Richland and Kennewick to boom.

When peacetime arrived in 1945, the wartime boom did not turn to a bust for the region.

By 1950, Pasco's population was 10,228 -- more than double what it was before the war, yet only half the population of Richland, which had mushroomed from almost nothing.

Pasco is the seat of Columbia Basin College (1955). Inc.

In 1976 the Teton Dam collapsed, causing disastrous flooding of the upper Snake River valley.

Kennewick and Richland tried again to consolidate in 1988, leaving Pasco out of it.

Pasco, Washington is growing extremely quickly; it is growing faster than 91% of similarly sized cities since 2000.

Franklin County, in 2006, became the first majority Hispanic county in the Pacific Northwest, according to the Associated Press.

The estimated population of Pasco in 2007 was 50,120, making it the 18th largest city in the state and the second largest of the Tri-Cities, after Kennewick.

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