HistoryLink Tours

No trip to Issaquah is complete without a trip to Boehm’s. Julius Boehm, an Austrian who moved to the Seattle area in the early 1940s, opened his first candy store in Seattle in 1942. Business was so good that in 1956 he opened a second store in Issaquah. He modeled his new store in the style of an Alpine chalet, the first such chalet built in the Pacific Northwest. The building served a dual purpose of a store and candy kitchen on the first floor and Boehm’s residence upstairs.

More than 20 years later, Boehm had a replica of a twelfth-century Alpine chapel built next to his store as a memorial to deceased mountaineers (Boehm was himself an avid mountain climber). It opened in 1981 and features a ceiling mural modeled after Michelangelo’s frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican.

The store and the candy kitchen have employed more than a thousand young Issaquah residents over the years. In later years, some of these employees were children of former employees. One of these early hires, Bernard Garbusjuk, assumed ownership of the business after Boehm died in 1981 and continues at the helm nearly four decades later, making fine and exotic chocolates and caramels, sometimes with unusual and unexpected ingredients such as ginger and Indian Madras curry.