Purdy, Washington
human settlement in Washington, United States of America
Purdy is a small unincorporated community and census-designated place north of the city of Gig Harbor, and at the junction of Washington State Routes 16 and 302 on the northern boundary of Pierce County, Washington.
Purdy is on the shores of Burley Lagoon and Henderson Bay at the northern end of Carr Inlet in Puget Sound. The lagoon and bay are separated by a sandspit and the Purdy Bridge.
The Washington Corrections Center for Women, originally named the Purdy Treatment Center, is colloquially referred to as "Purdy", though it has a Gig Harbor address.
As of the 2020 census, Purdy had a population of 1,668.
History
Prior to white settlement, the area was inhabited by Native Americans, who fished and clammed on Henderson Bay.
In 1884, one Isaac Hawk sold 19 acres (77,000 m2) of land for $23.75 (equivalent to $851 in 2025). The purchaser was logger and Civil War veteran Horace Knapp (born March 23, 1845, in Titusville, Pennsylvania; died February 1, 1913, in Gig Harbor, Washington), who subdivided the land into lots and blocks to form the town of Purdy. The town's naming rights were taken by Joseph W. Purdy, a grocer from Tacoma, Washington, who had donated the materials to construct the community's first schoolhouse; the schoolhouse's land was donated by Knapp.
On February 8, 1885, Knapp married Josephine Fuller, after which they moved to the Purdy area, making her Purdy's first white female settler.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Purdy, Washington” as human settlement in Washington, United States of America. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q597332. VIAF identifies the subject as 146790596. The Library of Congress control number is n2005055262. Authority coordinates are 47.389, -122.625. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1884, 2025 and 1845.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purdy, Washington” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.