village of Washington in Guernsey county, Ohio, was laid out in 1810 and was chartered as a city in 1888.
WASHINGTON, a borough and the county-seat of Washington county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., about 25 m. S.W. of Pittsburg and about 30 m. N.E. of Wheeling, West Virginia, on Chartiers Creek. Pop. (1900) 7670, of whom 465 were foreign born and 984 were negroes; (1910) 18,778. Washington is served by the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio, the Chartiers Valley branch of the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis (Pennsylvania system) and the Waynesburg & Washington railways and a connecting line for freight service, and by electric railway to Pittsburg. Among its public buildings and institutions are the county court-house (in which are the rooms of the Washington County Historical Society), the Federal building, two hospitals, a Y.M.C.A. building and a public library. It is the seat of Washington and Jefferson College, of Washington Seminary (1836) for girls and of a school of business. Washington and Jefferson College was incorporated, in 1865, by the consolidation of two rival institutions, Washington Academy and Jefferson College. Washington Academy (incorporated in 1787 and endowed by the legislature of Pennsylvania), which was opened in 1789, was incorporated as Washington College in 1806, and in 1852 became a synodical college of the Presbyterian Church, under the direction of the synod of Wheeling. Jefferson College, which was an outgrowth of Canonsburg Academy at Canonsburg, 7 m. from Washington, was chartered in 1794, and incorporated as Jefferson College in 1802; from 1826 until 1838 the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia was its medical department. In 1869, by an act of the legislature, all departments were located at Washington. In 1872 a chair of engineering and applied mathematics and one of biology were established with an endowment of $40,000, the gift of Dr Francis J. LeMoyne, and the chairs of Greek and of Latin were endowed by the Rev. C. C. Beatty with $60,000. In 1909–1910 Washington and Jefferson College (including Washington and Jefferson Academy) had 29 instructors, 413 students, about 20,000 volumes in its library and an endowment of $630,000. Washington is in a bituminous coal and natural gas region, and there are manufactories of glass, iron tubing and pipe, tin plate, steel, &c. The site was part of a tract bought in 1771 by David Hoge and was known at first as Catfish camp after an Indian chief, Tingooqua or Catfish. It was platted in October 1781 and called Bassettown in honour of Richard Bassett (d. 1815), a member of the Federal constitutional convention of 1787 and of the United States Senate in 1789–1793, and governor of Delaware in 1798–1801. The village was replatted in November 1784 and renamed in honour of General Washington, to whom a large part of the site had belonged. The early settlers were chiefly Scotch-Irish. At first a part of Strabane township, one of the original thirteen townships of Washington county, in February 1786 Washington was made a separate election district; it was incorporated as a town in 1810; was chartered as a borough and enlarged in 1852, and its limits were extended in 1854 and 1855. Since 1900 there have been added to the borough North and South Washington and the industrial suburb of Tylerdale, East and West Washington, although practically one with the borough, remaining under separate administration. The location of Washington on the old “National Road” gave it importance before the advent of railways. At the LeMoyne crematory established here by Dr Francis Julius LeMoyne,[1] on the 6th of December 1876, took place the first public cremation in the United States; the body burned was that of Baron Joseph Henry Louis de Palm (1809–1876), a Bavarian nobleman who had emigrated to the United States in 1862 and had been active in the Theosophical Society in New York.
See Boyd Crumrine (ed.), The History of Washington County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882); and Alfred Creigh, The History of Washington County from its First Settlement to the Present Time (Harrisburg, 1871).
WASHINGTON, the most north-westerly state of the United States of America. It lies between latitudes 45° 32′ and 49° N. and between longitudes 116° 57′ and 124° 48′ W. On the N. it is bounded by British Columbia, along the 49th parallel as far W. as the middle of the Strait of Georgia and then down the middle of this strait and Haro Strait, and along the middle of the channel the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which separate it from Vancouver Island; on the E. the south portion of its boundary is the Snake river, which separates it from Idaho, but from the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers (a little W. of 117°) the E. boundary line between Washington and Idaho runs directly N.; on the S. the Columbia river separates it from Oregon from the mouth of that river to the point of the upper intersection with the 46th parallel of N. latitude, but from thence eastward the S. boundary line between Washington and Oregon is the 46th parallel; on the W. the state is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. The state has a maximum length, from E. to W., of 360 m. and a maximum width of 240 m.; area, 69,127 sq. m., of which 2291 sq. m. are water surface.
Physical Features.—The western half of Washington lies in the Pacific Mountains province, consisting of the Coast range and the Cascade range, separated by a broad basin known as the Sound Valley. The eastern half of the state is occupied in the north by a westward extension of the Rocky Mountains, and in the centre and south by the north-western portion of the Columbia Plateau province. The most prominent physical feature of the state is the Cascade mountain range, which with a N.N.E. and S.S.W. trend crosses the state 30 to 40 m. W. of the middle. On the S. border this mountain range occupies a tract about 50 m. in width, and to the northward it widens to 100 m. or more. The general height of the ridges and peaks is about 8000 ft. above the sea, but there are five ancient snow-capped volcanoes which equal or exceed 10,000 ft. These are Mount Rainier or Tacoma (14,363 ft.), Mount Adams (12,470 ft.), Mount Baker (10,827 ft.), Glacier Peak (10,436 ft.) and Mount St Helens (10,000 ft.). Glaciers are common both in the N. and in the S. region, even on the higher elevations. Both slopes of the Cascades are cut deep by valleys. Along the Pacific Coast the ridges of the Coast range are only about 1500 ft. in height in the S. part of the state, but they rise northward in the Olympic Mountains and reach a maximum of elevation on Mount Olympus of 8150 ft. The Olympics meet the ocean along a rather straight line, but farther S. the coast line is broken by Gray's Harbour and Willapa Bay, the drowned lower portions of river valleys. The upheaval of the Cascade Mountains on the E. and the Olympic Mountains and Coast range on the W. left between them the Puget Sound Basin, the gently sloping sides of which descend in the central portion to less than 100 ft. from sea-level. A still greater subsidence farther north produced Puget Sound. East of the Cascade Mountains the Columbia and Spokane rivers mark the boundary between the Okanogan Highlands to the northward and the Columbia plateau to the southward. The Okanogan Highlands, an outlier of the Rocky Mountains extending westward from the Cœur d'Alene Mountains in Idaho, reach heights of 5000 to 6000 ft. above the sea, but are characterized by long gentle slopes, rounded divides and wide stream basins. In some of the larger valleys there are glacial terraces. The Columbia plateau consists of horizontal beds of lava having a total thickness of several thousand feet, and its surface has a general elevation of 1000 to 2000 ft. above sea-level. West of the Columbia river the plain is broken by several monoclonal ridges rising 2000 to 3000 ft. above it and extending eastward 50 to 75 m. from the foothills of the Cascades. In some parts, especially (in Douglas and Grant counties) within the Big Bend of the Columbia, the plain is frequently cut by coulees, or abandoned river channels, some of them 500 to 600 ft. deep and with very precipitous walls. The Grand Coulée represents the course of the Columbia river during the glacial period, when its regular channel was blocked with ice. There are also deep canyons which have been cut by the rivers in their present courses, especially by the Snake river and its tributaries. The S.W. corner of the state is occupied by the Blue Mountains, which rise about 7000 ft. above the sea and are cut deep by canyons. About 11,000 sq. m. in Washington have a minimum elevation exceeding 3000 ft.; an approximately equal area has a maximum elevation less than 500 ft., and the mean elevation of the entire state is 1700 ft.
The Okanogan Highlands, the Columbia plain, the E. slope of the Cascade Mountains and the S. portion of the Puget Sound Basin are drained by the Columbia and its tributaries. This large river enters the N.E. corner of the state from the N., traverses it in a winding course from N. to S. forms the greater portion of its S. boundary, and discharges into the Pacific Ocean. The Snake (in
- ↑ LeMoyne (1798–1879) was the son of a French refugee, and was an ardent abolitionist. In 1840 he was the Liberty party's candidate for the vice-presidency. He built a normal school for negroes near Memphis, Tennessee, and gave money to Washington College, at which he had graduated in 1815. Largely through LeMoyne's influence Washington became an important point on the “underground railway” for assisting runaway slaves to Canada.
