Documented history of Puget Sound began in 1792 when Captain George Vancouver, sailing for King George III of England, explored and charted the waterway, named it for his first mate Peter Puget, and during a long-boat journey along its eastern shoreline stopped with local natives near what historians believe was Browns Point before rounding the point and seeing the bay and mountain he named for Admiral Peter Rainier. In 1841 Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Navy charted and named the site Point Harris, in 1877 Lieutenant Ambrose Wyckoff of the U.S. Navy surveyed the area and renamed it Point Brown, and in 1903 the Department of Labor and Commerce officially changed the name to Browns Point. The region is the traditional homeland of the Puyallup people, and Browns Point was originally part of the Puyallup Tribal Reservation until the reservation was divided into family allotments in 1886 and this area was deeded to tribal members Joe Douette and Jerry Meeker, a prominent local resident whose Native name, La-Hal-Da, was given to a street in Browns Point. A lantern on a post was placed there in 1887 to help guide ships and boats into the bay, and after the United States Lighthouse Service purchased the property in 1901 because a lighthouse and fog signal were needed for safety on the increasingly busy waterway, a wooden lighthouse and keeper's house were built in 1903. The first light keeper, Oscar Brown, arrived in 1903, used existing outbuildings for his farm animals, added sturdier structures, drew water at first from springs on the property and from a rain-collecting tank behind the house, and lived with a mud flat between the lighthouse and keeper's house that had been filled by the early 1930s to create a grassy landscape. In 1939 responsibility for American lighthouses passed to the United States Coast Guard, and today Metro Parks Tacoma and the Points NE Historical Society maintain the property for public use as Browns Point Lighthouse Park, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and on the Washington State and Pierce County Historic Registers.