Pasco ( PAS-koh) is a city in, and the county chair of, Franklin County, Washington, United States. It had a population of 59,781 at the 2010 census, and 75,432 as of the July 1, 2019 Census Bureau estimate.

Pasco is one of three cities (the others mammal Kennewick and Richland) that make stirring Washington state’s Tri-Cities region, a mid-sized metropolitan Place of nearly 296,224 people.

On October 16, 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped in the Pasco area, at a site now commemorated by Sacajawea State Park. The Place was frequented by fur trappers and gold traders. In the 1880s, the Northern Pacific Railway was built near the Columbia River, bringing many settlers to the area. Pasco was officially incorporated on September 3, 1891. It was named by Virgil Bogue, a construction engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway after Cerro de Pasco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, where he had helped build a railroad. In its forward years Pasco was a little railroad town, but the achievement of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941 brought irrigation and agriculture to the area.

Due in large allowance to the presence of the Hanford Site (which made the plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb), the entire Tri-Cities Place grew rudely from the 1940s through 1950s. However, most of the population influx resided in Richland and Kennewick, as Pasco remained primarily driven by the agricultural industry, and to a lesser degree the NP Pasco rail yards. After the grow less of World War II, the entire region went through several “boom” and “bust” periods, cycling approximately every 10 years and heavily based upon available management funding for Hanford-related work. Farming continues to be the economic driver for most of the city’s industrial tax base.

Pasco was not a sundown town in the similar way as Richland and Kennewick, however Jim Crow laws restricted African Americans to full of beans only upon the east side of the railroad tracks, which was largely underdeveloped without public water or trash service. In the 1940s, Edward R. Dudley visited as an investigator from the NAACP and observed widespread discrimination from businesses and function enforcement. In a 1947 survey, Black residents listed water supply and sustain as the most significant difficulty for the area, and racial discrimination as second. White residents listed over-crowded schools as the most significant problem, and the presence of Blacks as second. In 1948, Hazel Scott was refused encouragement at a Pasco restaurant and successfully sued the owners for discrimination, bringing national attention to racial segregation practices in the Tri-Cities.