Washington Facts

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated industrial hemp on their plantations, primarily for its versatile fibers used in ropes, textiles, and other industrial goods, not for its psychoactive properties.

There are 365 steps inside the U.S. Capitol Building leading from the basement to the top of the dome - one for every day of the year.

Mount St. Helens grew a brand-new glacier inside the crater its 1980 eruption left behind. Snow and rockfall piled up in the shade of the crater walls until the ice began to flow. In 2004 a new lava dome punched through it and cut it in half, but the two arms flowed around the dome and merged again by 2008. Crater Glacier is still creeping across the crater floor today.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.