We see George Washington every day. The Father of our Country looks down on us from the seal of our state flag flying over public buildings. His profile gives us the side-eye from state route road signs. Yet, Washington never slept here.

Though we count George, Martha, and Mount Vernon among our cities, Washingtonians have no sacred sites of remembrance at which to gather for the semiquincentennial. Nevertheless, during my travels across the state to meet with different communities, it has become clear to me that many residents of the Evergreen State feel a deep connection to the American Revolution.

The people of what we now call Washington state knew nothing of the drama of independence unfolding in Philadelphia in 1776. And why should it be otherwise? The squabbling among British colonists over 2,000 miles away had nothing to do with them.

This was Indigenous America. Home to diverse peoples, following different lifeways reflecting the ecological diversity of the Pacific Northwest from the lush rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula to the semi-arid Columbia Plateau.

The peoples of the Pacific Northwest first encountered Europeans only two years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Spanish captain Juan José Pérez Hernández began charting the coastline in 1774. Anglophones were latecomers. British mariners arrived in 1778. The first American trader, Robert Gray, plied the Salish Sea in 1788. By the time that Lewis and Clark arrived on the Oregon Coast in 1805, countless Euro–American mariners and traders had preceded them.

Lands north of the Columbia River did not become part of the United States until the Oregon Treaty of 1846. The treaty divided the Oregon Territory between the British empire and the United States along the 49^th parallel. Settler colonists transformed Native homelands in the Willamette Valley into commercial farmland. Indigenous societies, such as the Sinixt people, continued to maintain their community in defiance of the border that British and American diplomats drew over their homelands in an act of imperial hubris.

Washington is a state that almost wasn’t. The House of Representatives took up a bill to create the Columbia Territory in 1853. Richard H. Stanton of Kentucky proposed changing the name of the new territory to Washington. Reasoning that the United States already had the District of Columbia, he shared his “desire to see, if I should live so long . . .  a sovereign State bearing the name of the Father of his Country.” The bill passed the House and Senate, creating the Washington Territory on March 2, 1853. And Stanton did live to see the admission of Washington to the Union in 1889.

What, then, does the semiquincentennial mean to the people of Washington? A territory named by a misty-eyed Kentuckian caught up in the nineteenth-century cult of George Washington. A state that did not join the Union until well over a century after the Declaration of Independence. A place made up of the homelands of 29 federally recognized tribes, who have been custodians of the land and water since time immemorial. An increasingly diverse state with a Latinx population of over one million and growing, many of whom are migrant workers in the state’s agricultural sector that is all too often overlooked in favor of the corporate giants like Amazon.

This is, perhaps, an impossible question to answer. But, it is something that I have been pondering as a have worked with local Public Broadcasting Stations to preview Ken Burns’s latest documentary series on the American Revolution and traveled the state as part of Humanities Washington’s Speaker’s Bureau in 2026–2027.

I shall share some of my notes.

Some Washingtonians claim a literal genealogical connection with the Revolution. There are thirty-eight chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution and ten chapters of the Sons of the American Revolution in the state. Membership of both is open to anyone who can prove they are lineal descendants of an American patriot. You don’t have to join an organization to feel a family connection to the Revolution. An audience member at one of my recent Humanities Washington talks assured me that her ancestors were neighbors of Peter Jefferson. “Surely, they must have known Tom,” she told me.

Other Washingtonians articulate a fictive kinship with the Revolution. Some of the people I have spoken with talk about sharing a sense of belonging to a national community with roots “back East.” They imagine themselves as part of the story of the American people who migrated across the continent from the east coast to the Pacific Northwest. Their own family history might begin in Asia, or Scandinavia, or South America. But, they still see themselves in the origin story of the United States that begins in New England or Virginia.

The idea of liberty as a common revolutionary inheritance shared by Americans is not an inherently chauvinistic celebration of American exceptionalism. In a community discussion of the Ken Burns documentary at KSPS PBS, Lisa Gardner, president of the Spokane NAACP, spoke eloquently about the meaning of liberty to her as a Black woman, battling with the knowledge that the idea that all men are created equal did not apply to her people. But, the meaning of the Revolution for Gardner was less about the hypocrisy of the Founders than it was about demonstrating the patriotism of African Americans who fought for the cause of liberty without sharing in its fruits. For Warren Seyler, an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, the Revolution unleashed the settlers who took away liberty from his ancestors. Yet, this tragic history does not deter Seyler from believing that we ought to work towards the goal of achieving liberty for all.

These notes are incomplete. The people that I encounter on my travels are self-selecting. They chose to attend public events about the American Revolution. I don’t hear from Washingtonians for whom the 250^th anniversary of independence is irrelevant, or worse, an upsetting reminder of how far the nation has fallen short of its founding ideals. Yet, for the Washingtonians who are engaged with the semiquincentennial, the Declaration of Independence is not something written long ago by people who lived far away. It has meaning in their lives that transcends time and place. We see George Washington every day.