For thousands of years,[6] members of the Suquamish people and their ancestors lived on the land now called Bainbridge Island.

[6] In 1792, English explorer Captain George Vancouver spent several days with his ship HMS Discovery anchored off Restoration Point at the southern end of Bainbridge Island while boat parties surveyed other parts of Puget Sound.

Vancouver spent a day exploring Rich Passage, Port Orchard, and Sinclair Inlet.

Lt. Wilkes named the island after Commodore William Bainbridge, commander of the frigate USS Constitution in the War of 1812.

In 1855, the Suquamish tribe relinquished their claim to Bainbridge Island by signing the Point Elliott Treaty.

[10] The Suquamish agreed to cede all of their territory (which included Bainbridge Island) to the United States in exchange for a reservation at Port Madison and fishing rights to Puget Sound.

These radio intercept sites along the West Coast were used to track Japanese warships and merchant marine vessels as far away as the Western Pacific.

[13] Since the 1960s, Bainbridge Island has become an increasingly affluent bedroom community of Seattle, a 35-minute ride away on the Washington State Ferries.

[17] Bainbridge Island was formed during the last ice age—13,000 to 15,000 years ago—when the 3,000-foot-thick (910 m) Vashon Glacier scraped out the Puget Sound and Hood Canal basins.

The island has an irregular coastline of approximately 53 miles (85 km), with numerous bays and inlets and a significant diversity of other coastal land forms, including spits, bluffs, dunes, lagoons, cuspate forelands, tombolos, tide flats, streams and tidal deltas, islands, and rocky outcrops.

Numerous public right of way access points to water around the island also exist, officially called Road Ends.

[21] When the city of Winslow annexed the entirety of Bainbridge Island in 1991, it absorbed numerous named unincorporated communities.

The socioeconomic profile varies significantly between the rural parts of the island and Winslow, its urban center.

In 2010, the census block group in which Winslow is located had a median household income of $42,000, less than half of the island's median household income and one-third of several of the island's wealthiest block groups, and also $10,000 less than national and statewide averages.

The island's high school lacrosse team has won state titles, the most recent coming on May 19, 2007.

Pickleball was invented by the family of congressman Joel Pritchard at their summer home on Bainbridge Island in 1965.

In the U.S. Congress Bainbridge is part of Washington's 6th congressional district and is represented by Democrat Derek Kilmer.

[32] In the 2008 Democratic primary (which in Washington state was not used for delegate appointment), Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton by a margin of 67.8% to 29.7%.

It was developed by Cynthia Sears, who began collecting works of art made by island residents in 1989.

The novel's author, David Guterson, lives on the island and worked for ten years as a teacher at Bainbridge High School.

[citation needed] Bainbridge Island is the main setting of the 2021 novel You Love Me, the third installment in the You series by novelist Caroline Kepnes.

[36] In Michael Crichton's 1994 novel Disclosure, protagonist Tom Sanders lives with his wife and two children on Bainbridge Island.