Vancouver

Vancouver is a city in southwestern Washington, United States, on the north bank of the Columbia River facing Portland, Oregon. Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company post on the river, gave it its name and its start.

The Hudson's Bay Company built the fort in 1825 under John McLoughlin as the center of its fur trade west of the Rocky Mountains, with farms, orchards and workshops around it. American settlers took up land beside the fort in the 1840s, and Vancouver was incorporated as a town in the 1850s. In 1937 Valery Chkalov and his crew landed at Pearson Field after flying from Moscow over the North Pole, the first nonstop flight between the Soviet Union and the United States.

ZoomInfo, which sells business contact data and sales software, has its head office in Vancouver. Burgerville, a fast-food company of the region, began in the city and serves burgers made with beef and berries from Pacific Northwest farms. The Port of Vancouver USA ships grain from the farms of the Columbia basin and unloads cars and wind turbine parts.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site has a rebuilt stockade, a blacksmith shop and a kitchen garden on the site of the old fort. Officers' Row, a line of Victorian houses facing a green, is named after the officers who lived there, among them the young Ulysses S. Grant. Esther Short Park, given to the town by the settler Esther Short, is among the oldest public squares in the state. The Pearson Air Museum on the old airfield shows the story of early flight in the Northwest.