Legend has it that the Duwamish Indians, who lived in what would become the greater Seattle area, believed Mercer Island was inhabited by an evil spirit. Thus they largely stayed away from the Island except to gather wild berries in the daytime.

 
Another story relates to their belief that the Island sank into the lake each night and rose again in the morning. But eventually, pioneers took their chances on the sinking island and began to settle here.

 

Mercer Island was named in 1860 after Judge Thomas Mercer, one of the three Mercer brothers who were among the early settlers in the Seattle area.

Mercer Island was slow to attract settlers at first, a fact that must seem incredible to today¹s real estate brokers. Some early settlers came and went, but it wasn’t until 1885 that Charles and Agnes Olds, the Island¹s “first family,” settled on the Island that other homesteaders began to establish themselves on the Island.

Near the turn-of-the-century, a wealthy entrepreneur named C.C. Calkins built a very large hotel, the Calkins Hotel, on the west side of the Island But after only a few years, Calkins¹ fortunes changed and he had to sell the hotel. Fire destroyed it in 1908, and with it Calkins¹ dreams of turning the Island into a fashionable resort. Gradually, the Island¹s population grew and steamers transported people and goods across Lake Washington. It wasn¹t until 1940, when a bridge was built between Mercer Island and Seattle - the world¹s largest concrete floating bridge - that the population began to boom.

Before the bridge was completed, the population was about 1,200. A decade later it was 4,500, and by the time Mercer Island was incorporated into a city in 1960, it was 12,000.

 

In the 1980s the Island¹s connection to Seattle was replaced by a new floating bridge with two tunnels. Interstate 90 was trenched across the north end of the Island in the most expensive and environmentally creative stretch of interstate in the United State. And Mercer Island gained a new 22-acre Park on the Lid, with playfields, tennis courts and parkland over the lanes of the interstate.