Biohazard Cleanup Near West Rainier Rainier, WA

Rainier is a small city in Thurston County — a city, not the mountain — that was named in 1884 for its view of Mount Rainier.

Rainier sits on the Tenalquot Prairie, whose Lushootseed name is sometimes rendered 'the best yet' or 'happy land.'

The community began in the 1870s as a 'Prairie Line' stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad between Kalama, Tenino, and Tacoma.

German immigrants Albert and Maria Gehrke were the first non-Indigenous settlers to homestead in Rainier, arriving in 1890, and the town was platted in 1891 by George H. Ellsbury, partly as a cooperative settlement called the Rainier Colony.

Rainier became a logging town after the Bob White Lumber Company opened in 1906, but a series of fires in the late 1920s and early 1930s destroyed its mills, and the 1941 WPA Guide to Washington described Rainier as a 'ghost lumber town.'

Rainier was officially incorporated on October 20, 1947, by a town vote of 74 to 31, when its population was only about 315.

Rainier had a population of 2,369 at the 2020 census, living in 814 households, up from just 331 residents in 1950; most residents today commute to Olympia or Tacoma.

Rainier averages about 50 inches of precipitation a year, with November the wettest month.

The city's parks include Veterans Memorial Park and Wilkowski Park, and the paved Yelm–Rainier–Tenino Trail for pedestrians and cyclists passes through town, linking Rainier with Yelm and Tenino.

Rainier is served by the Rainier School District, which operates an elementary school, a middle school, and Rainier High School; the original high school was destroyed by fire on May 4, 1974, and a new building opened on September 1, 1976.