James Urquhart

James Urquhart (March 15, 1822 – February 23, 1901) served three terms in the Washington Territory legislature. He was also elected to three terms as a county commissioner in Lewis County, Washington. He was a delegate to the Washington State Constitutional Convention. In 1873 he laid out the town of Napavine where he was Postmaster and ran the general store. He chose the town's name from the Indian word "napavoon" meaning small prairie.

Urquhart was born in Dingwall, Ross-Shire, Scotland. Cromarty and the Black Isle had been the home of the Clan Urquhart since ancient times. He left Ross-shire as a teenager going first to Arbroath on the North Sea coast where he learned the merchant's trade in an uncle's store. He then moved on to Linlithgow where he worked on the new railroad that was being constructed, married a local girl by the name of Helen Muir, and started a family of his own.

In 1851 Urquhart left his growing family in Scotland and sailed to New York City. He crossed the country, initially traveling through the antebellum south on foot to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi River by boat, and finally joining a wagon train and heading west on the Oregon Trail to the Oregon Territory. After working at several different jobs along the Columbia River, he filed a Donation Claim, homesteaded north of the river and voted in the first election in the newly created Washington Territory. His wife and children joined him in early 1855, sailing around Cape Horn on a journey that took six months.

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