Island County Origins
In January of this year, the Oregon Territorial Legislature carved Island County out of Thurston County, making it Washington’s eighth-oldest county.
What is 1853?
Island County’s first public health nurse, she lived on Whidbey from 1934 until her death in 1962.
Who is Polly Harpole?
This 1918 pandemic killed nearly 5,000 Washingtonians, most of them between the ages of 20 and 35.
What is the 1918 influenza pandemic?
This 1972 federal law is the backbone of surface water protection nationwide.
What is the Clean Water Act?
Once the largest producer of it in the world, Whidbey's Greenbank Farm was famous for growing this tart, red hybrid of a raspberry and a blackberry.
What is the loganberry?
At its creation, Island County covered all of northwest Washington. These four counties were later carved out of it.
What are San Juan, Skagit, Snohomish, and Whatcom?
Recognizing the need for local care, public health nurse Polly Harpole spearheaded grassroots fundraising efforts to establish this facility, Island County’s first public hospital.
What is Whidbey General Hospital? (or WhidbeyHealth)
In 1918, Seattle’s Red Cross distributed 250,000 of these six-ply items. Mayor Ole Hanson told commuters to wear one or walk (referring to streetcars).
What are masks?
Washington voters approved this 1971 act protecting shorelines statewide, among the first laws of its kind in the country.
What is the Shoreline Management Act?
Langley is famous for a roaming population of which feral domestic animals, descendants of escapees from the nearby county fairgrounds?
What are rabbits?
This settlement on Penn Cove was the original county seat, until Coupeville took over in 1891.
What is Coveland?
Mandated by the Washington State Legislature in 1893 to oversee local sanitary conditions, Island County established this governing body.
What is the Island County Board of Health?
In January 2020, the first confirmed U.S. case of COVID-19 was identified in a patient who had returned home to this Washington county.
What is Snohomish County?
This 1990 Washington law requires counties to designate and protect critical areas, including wetlands and aquifer recharge zones.
What is the Growth Management Act?
In 1998, downtown Coupeville was temporarily painted white and transformed into a fictional Massachusetts town for the filming of this movie.
What is Practical Magic?
Two weeks after the Donation Land Claim Act passed in 1850, this man filed the first claim on Central Whidbey — 640 acres that carry his name today.
Who is Isaac Ebey?
Recognized as the oldest continually serving board of its kind in Washington, this group provides community input to the Island County Board of Health.
What is CHAB? (Community Health Advisory Board)
In 2026, Island County Public Health activated regional coordination with Snohomish County over a case of this vaccine-preventable disease.
What is measles?
This 1974 federal ruling affirmed treaty tribes’ right to half the harvestable salmon in Washington.
What is the Boldt Decision?
This famous local waterway got its name after it tricked Captain George Vancouver into thinking Whidbey Island was a peninsula attached to the mainland.
What is Deception Pass?
Captain George Vancouver explored these waters in 1792 and named the larger island after this sailing master of HMS Discovery.
Who is Joseph Whidbey?
Dr. Bill Foege, the former CDC director who devised "ring vaccination" to eradicate smallpox, credited his strategy to two teenage summers doing this dangerous job in the Pacific Northwest.
What is fighting wildfires?
Ring vaccination made this the first disease ever eradicated, declared by the World Health Organization in 1980.
What is smallpox?
In 1982, the EPA designated Whidbey and Camano Islands as this type of critical groundwater supply, meaning it provides at least 50% of the drinking water for the area.
What is a Sole Source Aquifer?
Coupeville’s Big Rock and the Clinton boulder are these glacier-carried visitors, so reliably dated that scientists used them to calibrate a radiometric dating method.
What are glacial erratics?