Grays Harbor County was named after its discoverer, Captain Robert Gray. Gray was an American merchant sea captain who set his sights on Grays Harbor on May 7, 1792.
The area on the coast of Washington State was initially inhabited by the Quinault and Queets tribes and descendants of five other coastal tribes: Quileute, Hoh, Chehalis, Chinook, and Cowlitz. These tribes resided in family groups in long houses up and down the coast and were sustained by the land and by trade with neighboring tribes.
The first permanent settlers in 1850s Grays Harbor were farmers of primarily Scottish, English and Irish descent. The Harbor’s dense forests of spruce, hemlock, cedar and douglas fir attracted innumerable loggers to the area, which in turn, resulted in large lumber mills and a rapidly growing population. Soon, boat-building businesses, canneries and machine shops began to appear across the County. Immigrants from all over the world flocked to Grays Harbor for the jobs supplied by the mills and shipyards.
As the old-growth trees were used up, logging companies and the lumber mills gradually closed. Anticipating the end of old-growth harvests, Weyerhaeuser opened the nation’s first tree farm near Montesano in 1941. In another act to protect the forests in and around Grays Harbor, Congress passed the Forest Practices Act in 1946, which hoped for a sustained yield by managing the harvesting of National Forests in concert with the replanting of private lands.
The turn of the twenty-first century brought many new opportunities. Satsop built a large business park where hundreds of people work in a variety of industries. The $195 million prison at Stafford Creek opened in 2000 and houses nearly 2,000 inmates while employing close to 600 people. The Quinault Tribe opened a casino and resort complex on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Ocean Shores. The natural wonders of Olympic National Park, charter fishing, hunting, hiking, and the ocean beaches attract a growing tourism industry that draws people from around the world. Although there are still traces of Grays Harbor’s historic timber era, the area has grown to a vibrant, flourishing area thanks to the introduction of new businesses.