Why you'd want to live in Battle Ground

The city of Battle Ground lies near the geographical center of Clark County, 16 miles northeast of Vancouver. The city is sheltered by the Cascades to the east and the Coast Range to the west, and the climate is generally mild. At the time of first contact by Euro-Americans the area was occupied mainly by Chinook and Western Klickitat Indians. The name Battle Ground, which commemorates an 1855 "battle" that never actually happened, originally referred to a site northeast of the current city, near what is today called Battle Ground Lake. The first permanent non-Indian settler put down roots on the eastern edge of today's Battle Ground in 1862, and the earliest homesteaders tended to congregate to the north and east of today's city. It wasn't until the railroad came through in 1902 that the name Battle Ground became associated exclusively with the town, and the first town plat was recorded the following year. Formal incorporation did not come until 1951, making Battle Ground the most recent city in Clark County to take that step. The town's economy was dominated by timber, agriculture, and dairy, but population growth was extremely slow until the last decades of the twentieth century. In recent years, as its legacy industries have declined in importance, Battle Ground's proximity to both Portland and Vancouver has drawn a flood of new residents. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen it become one of the fastest-growing cities in the state, and it remains the commercial, cultural, and educational hub of central Clark County. via Photo by Katdee Barker