Junius Rochester, whose family has shaped the city for many generations, is an award-winning Northwest historian and author of numerous books about Seattle and other places.
With the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, refrigerated fresh fish was shipped to eastern markets. This activity made the Pacific Northwest fishing industry famous throughout the world.
In 1893 a regional historian with a penchant for hyperbole described King County as "emphatically one of the great, if not the greatest, counties of the Northwest . . ."
As the Grange grew, it pushed successfully for political reform, such as doubling legal immigration for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, providing labor for rural areas.
In 1945, following the Second World War, and when anti-Soviet feeling in the U.S. was burgeoning, a young man from Seattle named Eugene Dennis succeeded Earl Browder as leader of the U.S. Communist Party.