HistoryLink Tours

When this area was first settled in the nineteenth century it served as a hop farm; in the twentieth, it was a dairy farm. In 1993 the City of Issaquah bought part of the land and named it Issaquah Creek Park. Soon after, adjoining land was donated to the city by Julia Pritt, a Seattle philanthropist who founded the software company Attachmate. The donation came with the stipulation that it be named in some fashion after Pritt’s granddaughters, Cybil and Madeline. To add to the mix, long-time resident Vern Anderson donated another adjoining parcel to the city shortly before his 2008 death, with the stipulation that it be named after his grandfather, Tolle Anderson.

Because the three sites were contiguous to each other they naturally became known as the Confluence Parks, and later just as Confluence Park. The city began development of the park in the early 2010s, incorporating the stipulated names into park features (for example, the park has a “Cybil-Madeline Green”), and it opened with a community celebration in the summer of 2013. Further improvements, including a pedestrian bridge and a playground with designs chosen by community suggestions, followed in 2017. The park features picnic tables built with wood from the land, as well as a picnic shelter designed to look like an 1896 sawmill that was originally on the site. Both the Issaquah Creek and a smaller segment of the East Fork of the Issaquah Creek run through the 15.5-acre-park.