Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Krupp, WA

Krupp is a tiny town in Grant County that is legally incorporated under the name Krupp but is known to nearly everyone as Marlin, the name of its post office; HistoryLink describes it as the smallest town in Washington.

Krupp's population was 49 in the 2020 census, making it the least populous incorporated municipality in Washington; it counted 48 residents in 25 households in 2010 and 60 in 2000, down from a peak of 106 in 1920.

The town was incorporated on January 7, 1911, as a fourth-class town, and its first mayor was John Urquhart.

Krupp sits in a small valley along Crab Creek about 25 miles northeast of Moses Lake, hemmed in by canyon walls nearly 300 feet high, with State Route 28 as its main highway and a land area of just under 0.6 square miles.

The first recorded non-Native settler in the area was Henry Marlin, who built a cabin on Crab Creek in 1870.

When the Great Northern Railway came through in 1892, it bestowed the name Krupp on the new station, a name believed to have been aimed at a German farmer in the area.

Wheat made the young town boom: in 1907 a million bushels of wheat were stored in Krupp's seven warehouses, and its first school had opened in the autumn of 1901.

On August 25, 1909, a fire destroyed nearly the entire business district west of Urquhart Avenue, though the brick Farmers Bank building survived, and a second fire in July 1914 destroyed the town's hotel.

During World War I, in 1918, residents voted to rename the town Marlin, after pioneer Henry Marlin, to shed the name of the German munitions maker; the post office and railroad adopted the new name, but the change was never filed with the Secretary of State, so the town legally remains Krupp.

Krupp's school closed in 1966, two years after its last graduating class, and in the summer of 1971 the planned Sunrise '71 rock festival, expected to draw as many as 50,000 people, was stopped by a court injunction and police roadblocks.