City of Aberdeen Grays Harbor County, Washington

Name: City of Aberdeen
Address: Washington

Mapped Location

City of Aberdeen: The mapped location is an approximation and should not be used for navigation or wayfinding.

Information

General information on City of Aberdeen

Feature Type: Incorporated

Official, historical, colloquial and alternative toponyms for City of Aberdeen

A brief list of names that this geographic feature has been named

Name	Description
City of Aberdeen	Official
Aberdeen	Official

Origin Notes and History of City of Aberdeen

References to City of Aberdeen that document the origin of its place name

ABERDEEN, city in Grays Harbor (formerly called Chehalis) County. The town was platted by Samuel Benn in 1884 on his homestead. Benn was born in New York City and in 1856 he came to San Francisco. Three years later he moved to Washington Territory and settled on the Chehalis River. There are two sources claimed for the name of the city. John J. Carney (Names MSS., Letter 65) says it arose from the fact that, the Aberdeen Packing Company of liwaco established a cannery in early days on the Benn homestead. Hawthorne's History of Washington, Volume II., page 602, declares that the name was suggested by Mrs. James Stewart, who, before her marriage in 1868, was Miss Joan B. Kellan of Aberdeen, Scotland, who had come to America with her parents in 1849 and settled in Ohio. She and her husband moved to Washington Territory in 1874.

Edmond S. Meany in Origin of Washington Geographic Names

Meany, Edmond S., Origin of Washington Geographic Names, 1923 University of Washington, pp 1 | Origin of Washington Geographic Names

A Selected Bibliography of City of Aberdeen, Grays Harbor County, Washington

A compilation of essential readings detailing the history, geography, and culture of the region.

Red Harbor Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the PacificNorthwest : Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest by Aaron Goings

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Grays Harbor was the Lumber Capital of the World. While thousands of lumber and maritime workers fought for higher wages and decent conditions, employers unified to protect their interests, often through violent and corrupt means. They spied on unionists, expelled them from their own towns, vilified them in the press, and physically assaulted labor activists. But with deep roots in their communities, radical workers continued to meet in their halls and immigrant neighborhoods—and to influence the wider labor movement well into the 1930s. In Red Harbor, Aaron Goings resurrects the forgotten history of lumber workers in a bastion of labor radicalism, examining the conflict as workers faced down an alliance of employers, police, and violent anti-radicals, including the Ku Klux Klan. But he goes beyond these clashes to illuminate the vital roles of families, immigrants, and working-class women in the labor movement, revealing how people fought not only for labor rights but also for the good of their communities. The Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies) in particular adopted views and tactics from socialist Finnish immigrants while authoring programs responsive to local needs and supported by the people—radical and otherwise. Vivid and revealing, Red Harbor shines a light on lumber workers and the pursuit of justice in the Pacific Northwest.

360 Pages, 6 x 9 in, 19 b&w illus

Desiderata

History · 1st Edition · University of Washington Press, US, 2025
Related Catalog Items: City of Aberdeen · Grays Harbor City · Grays Harbor County · City of Hoquiam

Cohassett Beach chronicles World War II in the Pacific Northwest by Kathy Hogan, Klancy Clark De Nevers, Lucy Hart

In 1940, the Grays Harbor Post in Aberdeen, Washington, introduced its readers to "The Kitchen Critic," a new column chronicling life in nearby Cohassett Beach. Within a year the U.S. was at war, and columnist Kathy Hogan's weekly dispatches turned to soldiers, rationing, and the barbed wire that lined the sand dunes around her weathered cottage. 50 years later, Kathy Hogan's writings provide a window onto how one Pacific Northwest community responded to World War II. Cohassett Beach Chronicles, a collection of Hogan's columns from the war years, offers a remarkable social history of the war at home. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought U.S. troops to Cohassett Beach and to towns up and down the West Coast. With wit and perception, Hogan writes of civilians valiantly coping with this friendly occupation and wartime scarcity. Her neighbors — loggers, commercial fishermen, Finnish cranberry farmers — learn to live with blackouts, blimps, and a ban on beachcombing. Hogan's weekly descriptions of life on the home front capture America's wartime mood. Together, her columns document the war's tremendous impact at home, from the internment of Japanese Americans and the spread of government regulations to the changing role of women. They also reveal that in spite of the war effort life, in many ways, continued as it always had. There was still time to pick blackberries, gossip at the local tavern, and attend the occasional Friday night dance. As children, the editors spent summers in the Cohassett Beach cottages that still, in the late 1940s, bore scars of the Army's occupation.

xxx, 290 pages : illustrations, maps ; 27 cm

Desiderata

· 1st Edition · Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Or., 1995
Related Catalog Items: City of Aberdeen · Grays Harbor County · Cohassett · Cohassett Beach · Cohassett Lake

Grays Harbor County

Political Boundaries

Last updated: 2025-09-23