Whatcom is the original name for the city of Bellingham. The name of Bellingham is derived from the bay on which the city is situated. George Vancouver, who visited the area in June 1792, named the bay for Sir William Bellingham, the controller of the storekeeper's account of the Royal Navy. Prior to Euro-American settlement, this was in the homeland of Coast Salish peoples of the Lummi and neighboring tribes. The first Caucasian settlers reached the area in 1854. In 1858, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush caused thousands of miners, storekeepers, and scalawags to head north from California.

The land on which Everett was founded was surrendered to the United States by its original inhabitants under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott. Permanent settlement in the area by European descendants started in 1861 when Dennis Brigham built a cabin on a 160-acre claim on the shore of Port Gardner Bay. Over the next several years a handful of settlers moved to the area, but it wasn't until 1890 that plans for platting a town were conceived.

Snohomish was founded around 1858 by Emory C. Ferguson, E. F. Cady and others. It was originally known as Cadyville, but changed its name to Snohomish City in 1871. The name Snohomish comes from the name of the dominant local Native American tribe, whose meaning is widely disputed. One of the first inland cities in the Puget Sound region, Snohomish was built where a planned military road connecting Fort Steilacoom and Fort Bellingham was set to cross the Snohomish River.

Monroe was once the site of the Great Northern Railway's botanical gardens where fresh flowers for their passenger trains were once grown. Each day these flowers would be loaded aboard the Western Star for distribution throughout the system so that each dining car passenger might have fresh flowers with their meal.
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