William Rufus de Vane King! And who the fuck was he? HistoryLink has the story:

William Rufus de Vane King was a plantation owner in Alabama who was elected to the U.S. Senate and served there for 34 years. In 1844 he became ambassador to France, and his diplomacy enabled the United States to annex Texas. He was a key advocate of the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws that forged a compromise between slave states and free states concerning the extension of slavery into new states and territories. The compromise kept the Union together for a few more years before the Civil War, but included the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a harsh law requiring the return of alleged fugitive slaves from the North back into bondage in the South.

As for why this county was named after this slave owner, I don’t even want to know. The only great thing about him was the luck of his surname.

William_Rufus_DeVane_King_1839_portrait.jpeg

This post has to give much love to Radjaw of Mad Rad for making it happen.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

17 replies on “And Who Was King County First Named After?”

  1. King was vice president at the time the county was named. Franklin Pierce was the president. Since the territorial capital was in Steilacoom at the time, they named the county there after the sitting president and the one around Seattle, which was seen as smaller and lesser, after the sitting VP.

    In other words, an accident of timing.

  5. That sort of thing (naming places after then-prominent, now-obscure politicians who had nothing to do with the area’s establishment) is common in the West. Denver was named for the governor of Kansas. One of our best known mountains (Mt. Evans) was named after the governor of Illinois, and Colfax Ave was named after a vice president.

  6. I’ve had a few slaves myself [I was more of a slave driver]. They were also under threat of being sent back to the south. Shit; there are more african americans in bondage today for drug offenses than there were enslaved at the height of slavery in this country. Our society is just as corrupt and evil as any other society in history. Support states rights and cut off the global 1%. We need to create smaller self-sufficeint progressive utopias. Ron Paul Bitchez!

  7. Washington was pushing for statehood around then so were buttering up the powers that be.

    If you want something interesting (in a tragic sort of way) to read on MLK day: the various state Declarations of Secession. They tend toward high rhetoric modelled on the Declaration of Independence but the Texas one couldn’t quite manage that throughout. It includes: “the imbecility of the Federal Government”.

    I read this for the first time during Bush II.

    They’re handy to point to next time someone claims keeping slavery going wasn’t a central issue fot the war.

  8. They’re handy to point to next time someone claims keeping slavery going wasn’t a central issue fot the war.

    @8

    Thanks for the tip. I will look into them.

  10. Keep digging for the juicier stuff. King was the 15-year “roommate” of James Buchanan, the only American President who never married and who was nicknamed “Miss Nancy” by his contemporaries. Sounds pretty fitting for Seattle’s county in some ways.

  11. Why did you overlook the gay part? #11 is right!

    King was “close friends” with James Buchanan, and the two shared a house in Washington, D.C. for fifteen years prior to Buchanan’s presidency. Buchanan and King’s close relationship prompted Andrew Jackson to refer to King as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy”, while Aaron V. Brown spoke of the two as “Buchanan and his wife”. Further, some of the contemporary press also speculated about Buchanan and King’s relationship. Buchanan and King’s nieces destroyed their uncles’ correspondence, leaving some questions as to what relationship the two men had, but surviving letters illustrate the affection of a special friendship, and Buchanan wrote of his communion with his housemate. Buchanan wrote in 1844, after King left for France, “I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.” While the circumstances surrounding Buchanan and King have led authors such as Paul Boller to speculate that Buchanan was “America’s first homosexual president”, there is no direct evidence yet that he and King had a sexual relationship.

  12. Charles,
    My understanding is that King County is now named after Martin Luther King, Jr. The county logo has changed as well. It was a crown but is now the visage of MLK.

  14. @13, that’s correct, though I think the “First Named After” in the title shows that Charles knows the county’s namesake has been changed.

  17. Research (and by that I mean googling for 15 or 20 seconds) is not a practice of the Mudede Institute for Pontification.

    King, then 66, was nominated by the Democrats for the vice presidency in 1852, geographically balancing Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire at the top of the ticket. They easily won election in November.

    A month later, the Oregon Territorial Legislature created four counties in the Puget Sound region: King, Pierce, Jefferson and Island.

    Naming two of the counties after the president- and vice president-elect likely was designed to curry favor with the far-away national administration, UW history professor John Findlay said last week.

    Two days before leaving office, on March 2, 1853, Fillmore signed the act splitting off the Territory of Washington, including the four counties, from the Oregon Territory.

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