Sequim, Washington

Sequim (/ˈskwɪm/ ^ⓘ SKWIM) is a city in Clallam County, Washington, United States. It is located on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula between the Dungeness River and Sequim Bay. The city is south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and north of the Olympic Mountains. The population was 8,024 as of the 2020 census; the estimated population in 2023 was 8,203. Sequim is connected to nearby Port Angeles by U.S. Route 101, which runs south of the city's downtown.

The city lies within the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains and receives, on average, less than 16 inches (410 mm) of rain per year – about the same as Los Angeles, California – giving rise to the region's local nickname of Sunny Sequim. However, the city is relatively close to some of the wettest temperate rainforests of the contiguous United States. This climate anomaly is sometimes called the "Blue Hole of Sequim". Fogs and cool breezes from the Strait of Juan de Fuca make Sequim's climate more humid than would be expected from the low average rate of annual precipitation.

Sequim and the surrounding area are particularly known for the commercial cultivation of lavender, supported by the unique climate. The city is nicknamed the "Lavender Capital of North America". The area is also known for its Dungeness crab, named for the nearby Dungeness Spit.

The name Sequim is derived from the Klallam word sxʷčkʷíyəŋ, which means "hunting ground" or "place for going to shoot". It was adopted as the name of the settlement in 1879, with the spelling replacing the earlier "Seguim". The historic translation of "quiet waters" was disproven in 2010 by linguist Timothy Montler, who had researched the Klallam language and interviewed elders of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe. Sequim is pronounced as one syllable, with the e elided: "skwim"; a common mispronounciation is "see-kwim".

Fossils discovered in the late 1970s – at a dig near Sequim known as the Manis Mastodon site, by Carl Gustafson, an archaeologist at Washington State University – included a mastodon bone with an embedded bone point, evidencing the presence of hunters in the area about 14,000 years ago. According to Michael R. Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University, this is the first hunting weapon found that dates to the pre-Clovis period.

The S'Klallam tribe had inhabited the region prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. S'Klallam means "the strong people". The band of S'Klallam Indians disbanded into their own individual federally recognized tribes in the early 1900s. The local tribe is the Jamestown S'Klallam tribe, named after one of their early leaders, Lord James Balch. According to other tales, the town Sequim in S'Klallam means "a place for going to shoot", which represents the abundance of game and wildlife of the area. Archeological excavation during construction of the U.S. Route 101 bypass in the 1990s found artifacts that were dated between 6000 to 8000 years before present.

Manuel Quimper and George Vancouver explored the region's coast in the 1790s. The first European settlers arrived in the Dungeness Valley in the 1850s, settling nearby Dungeness, Washington. While the lands along the river became fertile farmlands, the remainder of the area remained arid prairie, known as "the desert". Irrigation canals first brought water to the prairie in the 1890s, allowing the expansion of farmlands.

Sequim was officially incorporated on October 31, 1913. For many decades small farms, mostly dairy farms, dotted the area around the small town. Near the end of World War I, Sequim became a stop for a railway that passed through from Port Angeles to Port Townsend, built primarily to carry wood products from the forests of the western Olympic Peninsula.