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Orillia, once vital, remembered in name only
BY PAT BRODIN
TUKWILA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Many folks are familiar with Orillia
Road which passes through the southwest-
erly portion of Tukwila from South 188th
Street and winds its way down the hill to
South 212th Street in Kent. Orillia is also a
place name
where a
small rural
commu-
nity once
thrived,
including
with its own
post office
and school.
You many
remember
a previ-
ous history
article about "wood -stave" pipe that sup-
plied water to the locals from well sources
through the Orillia Water Company. But
how did this little neighborhood get the
name Orillia'?
Let's take a step back into the late 1800s
when early settlers recognized the value
in the rich soil of the upper Duwamish,
The name
came from the
Spanish word
'orilla,' or shore
of a lake or
river.
Pat Brodin
The Orillia School served the large farming community in the Green River Valley. Here is a
school class in 1905. Tukwila Historical Society
Green, and White River valley. This fertile
region extended from Georgetown and
Boeing Field all the way south to Puyallup.
Word traveled fast in those days and many
were led by the promise of establishing a
homestead with some acreage of farmland
for crops and livestock. Orillia was located
at the southerly limits of Tukwila and in
the City of Kent. The Orillia Post Office
served the Renton Junction community
and the two communities comprised a
single voting precinct. By 1930, the Orillia
voting precinct had a total population of
1,026 people.
Many towns across Washington received
their names from the first postmaster. In
1887, Malcolm McDougall was appointed
U.S. postmaster for this vicinity and coined
it after his hometown of Orillia, Canada,
in southern Ontario. The most widely ac-
cepted account indicates that it originated
with a variant spelling from the Spanish
"orilla," signifying the shore of either a lake
or river. Orillia is on the inlet between the
larger Lake Simcoe and the lesser Lake
Couchiching. Ironically the namesake Ca-
nadian town of Orillia prospered as a re-
sult of agriculture and lumbering. Another
paradoxical aspect is that along the inlet
near Orillia, fishing weirs were used by the
Huron and Iriquois Indians for more than
4,000 years. Similarly, Puget Sound Salish
tribes such as the Native Duwamish people
used weirs to gather returning salmon.
Pat Brodin is a member of the Tukwila
Historical Society. The society operates the
Tukwila Heritage and Cultural Center,
14475 59th Ave. S. The center can be reached
by phone at 206-244-HIST or via email at
tukwilaheritagectr@tukwilahistory.org.