on the land of the Oregon Territory. Although the petition was heard in court, the amendment to let Blacks stay in the Oregon territory failed. Luckily for Washington, the petition to allow him to stay was barely passed with a 17-6 vote. However, on March 2nd, 1853 the Washington Territory which Washington eventually would make his claim in was made official and had no laws of exclusion. Washington then left Oregon and settled near the confluence of the Chehalis and Skookumchuck Rivers, and the Cochrans claimed the land for the family in 1852. When the Washington Territory was split from the Oregon Territory in 1853, the new territory's statutes did not preclude African-Americans from owning land, and the Cochrans sold their land to him for $6,000. George cared for his adoptive parents for the rest of their lives, and later married the newly-divorced Mary Jane Cain Cooness, helping raise her son, Stacey. Anticipating the arrival of the Northern Pacific railroad in 1872, Washington had visions of a town on the southeast corner of his land. Saying that it was the center point between Kalama and Tacoma, he named his settlement the city of Centerville. He named the streets after biblical references and set aside land for a park (now the site of the Carnegie Library) and churches of many denominations. The town was incorporated as Centralia, Washington, in 1886 after it was discovered that another town in the territory already bore the name Centerville (although that town has since changed its name to Stanwood). This made Washington the only black person to found a town in the Pacific Northwest. Washington was the proponent of steady growth using fair business practices. Some said that he spoke in such an honest and straightforward way that buyers would become suspicious. Despite facing some racial prejudice at the hands of newcomers, many of whom migrated from the segregated post-Civil War South, Washington supported many of the townspeople through the Panic of 1893, when the Northern Pacific went bankrupt and the town nearly collapsed. The town thrived in the boom started by the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, and by the time he died in 1905 at the age of 88, Centralia had grown to a town of around 5,000 residents, who turned out en masse to honor him at his funeral. He is buried in the town's Washington Lawn Cemetery. Centralia has a number