Biohazard Cleanup Near West Beverly Beverly, WA

Beverly is a small unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Grant County, Washington, on the banks of the Columbia River in central Washington.

The community is nestled at the base of Sentinel Gap, a water gap through the Saddle Mountains that predates the Columbia River itself, a few miles downriver from Wanapum Dam.

Beverly was named around 1905 by H. R. Williams after Beverly, Massachusetts.

Beverly boomed between 1905 and the 1920s, when hundreds of Milwaukee Road railroad workers lived there during construction of the line through the gap.

The Milwaukee Road completed the million-dollar Beverly Railroad Bridge across the Columbia just north of town in 1909, after nearly two years of construction supplied partly by steamboat — and the century-old black iron bridge still stands today.

Steep grades near Beverly meant helper locomotives were required to move trains through, and promoters printed brochures for easterners touting the sheltered townsite's long growing season.

From World War II into the 1980s, thousands of railcars passed through Beverly en route to the Hanford nuclear site, but rail service faded after the Milwaukee Road's 1977 bankruptcy and the tracks east of town were removed in the early 1980s.

Beverly was counted as a census-designated place for the first time in the 2020 census, which recorded 266 residents living in just 65 households.

Beverly is one of Washington's most heavily Hispanic communities — 95.5 percent of residents identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2020 — and one of its youngest, with a median age of just 20.7 years and about 44 percent of residents under 18.

Beverly has a semi-arid climate and occupies only about two-tenths of a square mile at an elevation of 574 feet; local students are served by the Royal School District.