Your home deserves the best. Contact us now for quick scheduling and dependable.

Steilacoom (/ˈstɪləkəm/ STIL-ə-kəm) is a town in Pierce County, Washington, United States. Steilacoom incorporated in 1854 and became the first incorporated town in what later became the state of Washington. It has also become a bedroom community for service members stationed at Joint Base Lewis–McChord, aka McChord AFB and Fort Lewis.

The origin of the name “Steilacoom” is unclear. According to the Legacy Washington program, the town’s name is derived from a Native American word meaning “little pink flower”. Another possibility is that it was named by fur traders with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and is an adaptation of Tail-a-Koom, the name of a Native American chief. In 1824, chief factor John Work called the town “Chilacoom”. Another early spelling was “Chelakom”. The Town of Steilacoom says it was named after the Steilacoom tribe, especially their main village in the Tacoma area, located on Chambers Bay. Robert Hitchman noted in Place Names of Washington that Steilacoom Creek, which feeds into Chambers Creek, held the name before the town.

Steilacoom had the first jail in Washington and the first sawmill. It has four individual buildings and sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the oldest Catholic Church in the state, the first Protestant Church north of the Columbia River, as well as the Steilacoom Historic District, with 68 contributing properties. The town remained prominent in the region until the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway, which opened in 1873 with a terminus in Tacoma. The county seat was moved from Steilacoom to Tacoma in 1880; an interurban streetcar was built in 1891 to connect the two cities. Fort Steilacoom was redeveloped into Western State Hospital, a state-run mental health facility that now lies in the adjacent and larger city of Lakewood.