Winthrop

At the forks of the rushing Methow, Boston-bred Guy Waring founded Winthrop in 1891, and trappers, prospectors, and homesteaders came into his frontier store. In 1895 Colonel Thomas Hart passed through to carve a narrow-gauge wagon road across the Cascades, linking the valley with the Slate Creek Mining District. Waring, who hated liquor, opened his Duck Brand Saloon to keep worse ones out, and anyone who started getting drunk was thrown out. Waring's Harvard classmate Owen Wister spent his honeymoon here in 1898, and four years later he completed The Virginian, after which the first western novel burst upon the nation. Winthrop's first postmaster named the town after Theodore Winthrop, a young Yale graduate who toured the northwest in 1853.

Winthrop, Washington · United States