His father was sold soon thereafter to another plantation and his mother gave George to Anna and James Cochran, a white couple who adopted and raised him.

Fearing he might lose his freedom after the passage of the Compromise of 1850, Washington moved the Cochrans and himself over the Oregon Trail.

When he recovered, he and the Cochrans moved back to the Milwaukie area, where eventually Washington settled his parents into a cabin close to Cowlitz Landing.

Although the law stood between Washington making a claim, he had the support of more than 100 pioneers who petitioned on his behalf to let him stay on the land of the Oregon Territory.

Washington then left Oregon and settled near the confluence of the Chehalis and Skookumchuck Rivers, and the Cochrans claimed the land for the family.

In his fifties, Washington married Mary Jane Cain Cooness, who was of African American and Jewish heritage,[4] and was a divorcee.

Anticipating the arrival of the Northern Pacific railroad in 1872, Washington had visions of a town on the southeast corner of his land.

Saying that it was the center point between Kalama and Tacoma, he named his settlement the city of Centerville and filing a plat that offiially created the town in 1875.

[6] He named the streets after biblical references and set aside land for a park (now the site of the Carnegie Library) and churches of many denominations.

Despite facing some racial prejudice at the hands of newcomers, many of whom migrated from the segregated post-Civil War South, Washington supported many of the townspeople through the Panic of 1893,[6] when the Northern Pacific went bankrupt and the town nearly collapsed.