Olympia, Washington

Where Olympia is

Olympia is the seat of Thurston County, at 47.04°N, 122.90°W, on Budd Inlet, the southernmost arm of Puget Sound. The Deschutes River enters the inlet here; a dam built in 1951 turned its mouth into Capitol Lake below the capitol, which the state has since begun restoring to an estuary. The Olympic Mountains are visible to the northwest across the sound, and the name Olympia comes from them. Interstate 5 runs through the city. Olympia is on Pacific Time.

How it became the capital

Settlers arrived at the falls of the Deschutes in the 1840s, when the area was part of Oregon Territory, and the customs house for Puget Sound was placed here in 1851. When Washington Territory was split off in 1853, Governor Isaac Stevens made Olympia the capital. Vancouver, Seattle, Ellensburg and other towns tried to take the capital over the following decades, and the question was settled by a referendum at statehood in 1889 and a final vote in 1890, which Olympia won.

Population

Olympia had 55,605 residents in 2020, the 24th-largest city in Washington. Seattle, the largest, had 737,015; Spokane and Tacoma each exceed 200,000. The Olympia–Lacey–Tumwater metropolitan area, coextensive with Thurston County, has about 295,000 people, about 4 percent of the state's 7,705,281.

The capitol

The Washington State Legislative Building was designed by Walter Wilder and Harry White of New York and completed in 1928 as the centerpiece of a campus of government buildings. Its sandstone dome rises 287 ft and is among the tallest self-supporting masonry domes in the world. The building has been damaged by earthquakes in 1949, 1965 and 2001 and reinforced each time. A five-ton Tiffany bronze chandelier hangs in the rotunda. The state's earlier capitols included a wooden building of 1856 and the former Thurston County courthouse, used from 1905 to 1928.

Distances to other cities

Mount Rainier is about 60 miles east. See the Cascade Range map.

Related maps

• Washington map — the whole state with borders, cities and counties.
• Washington county map · blank Washington map · printable Washington map.
• All 50 state capitals on one map, and the state capitals quiz.
• West region · Pacific division · Pacific Time Zone.