Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Tenino, WA

Tenino is a city in Thurston County, Washington, nicknamed "The Stone City" for its historic sandstone industry.

Tenino was incorporated on July 24, 1906, and it reorganized as a non-charter code city on July 29, 1990.

The city stands on a Native camas prairie once maintained by controlled burns; Stephen Hodgden filed a Donation Land Claim there in 1851, the settlement's first post office and school were called "Coal Bank" in the 1860s, and the town was platted in 1873.

According to city historian Richard A. Edwards, Tenino was named for the Oregon Steam Navigation Company steamboat Tenino, which carried a Northern Pacific committee to the site in early October 1872, though a Chinook Jargon origin meaning "fork" or "branch" is also long debated.

Tenino sandstone from the McIntosh Formation was prized because it withstood the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; it was used in Olympia's Old Capitol Building and old Thurston County Courthouse, the University of Washington's Denny Hall, Portland's Pittock Mansion, and federal jetties at Westport.

One of Tenino's abandoned sandstone quarries was converted into the city's community swimming pool.

Tenino is famous for its Depression-era wooden money: after the Citizens Bank of Tenino failed in December 1931, the town printed scrip on thin slices of spruce and cedar, and eight issues in 1932–1933 put $10,308 into circulation, of which only $40 was ever redeemed.

Tenino revived its wooden money in May 2020 as a COVID-19 relief program with State Auditor approval, and scrip from both eras was added to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's "The Value of Money" exhibit in 2025.

The 1914 Northern Pacific depot in Tenino, now the Tenino Depot Museum, is the only Northern Pacific depot built of Tenino sandstone, and wooden-money souvenirs are still printed there on the original press.

Tenino's downtown historic district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the stretch of U.S. Route 99 through town was notorious in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the "Speed Trap of the West."