Biohazard Cleanup Near Sequim Historic District Sequim, WA

Sequim is a city in Clallam County on the northern Olympic Peninsula, and its name — from the S'Klallam language, commonly rendered 'a place for going to shoot,' meaning a hunting ground — is pronounced as a single syllable, 'skwim.'

Sequim was incorporated in 1913.

The 2020 census counted 8,024 residents in Sequim, up from 6,606 in 2010, on a land area of about 6.3 square miles.

Census Bureau survey estimates for 2020-2024 put Sequim at about 4,222 households.

Sequim sits in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains and averages only about 16 inches of rain a year with some 300 days of sunshine — a break in the clouds that pilots nicknamed 'the Blue Hole.'

Sequim promotes itself as the Lavender Capital of North America: commercial lavender farming began in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley in the mid-1990s, and roughly two dozen lavender farms and businesses now operate there.

The city's Sequim Lavender Weekend, held the third weekend of July, draws visitors to the valley's lavender farms at peak bloom.

Even older is the Sequim Irrigation Festival, held each May since 1896 and billed as Washington's longest continuously running festival; it celebrates the irrigation ditches that made valley farming possible, under the motto 'Where Water Is Wealth.'

Just north of the city, Dungeness Spit stretches 5.5 miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and is the longest natural sand spit in the United States.

In 1977 a farmer near Sequim unearthed the Manis Mastodon bones, including a rib with a bone projectile point still embedded in it — among the oldest evidence of humans hunting large animals in North America.