Joshua Green Foundation Endowed Scholarship
EST. 1990
Please address your letter to:
The Family of Joshua Green
This endowment was established in 1990 by the Joshua Green Foundation in support of the University of Washington’s Medical Scientist Training Program in the School of Medicine. Graduates of this program complete the requirements for both an M.D. and Ph.D. degree and are equipped with the knowledge of human disease and advanced skills in laboratory research which enables them to bridge the clinical and basic sciences.
John Green had three sons, Thomas, George, and Joshua. With the spirit of pioneers, the three set out from the Maryland family home in 1824, bound for Texas. Joshua and Thomas stopped long before reaching that goal, finding opportunity in Jackson, Mississippi, where they opened a drug store. Joshua’s son William Green married Bentonia Harrison, and a son, named Joshua, was born in 1869, in the former mansion of the governor of Mississippi.
William Green’s family moved to Seattle in 1886, when Joshua was 17 years old. Joshua found jobs as a chainman on a surveying crew and as a purser on a sternwheeler steamer known as the Henry Bailey, one of the historic mosquito fleet vessels that connected Seattle to settlements along the Canadian border. Anxious to own a business, Green persuaded three fellow officers of the Henry Bailey to become partners in a 100-foot sternwheeler steamer called The Fanny Lake. The partners expanded their fleet, and created a side business of selling and delivering wholesale goods to customers in outlying towns. The firm was eventually named La Conner Trading and Transportation Co., with Joshua Green as president.
In 1913, Green founded the Puget Sound Navigation Co., a cross-Sound ferry service. However, the construction of paved highways caused many passengers to abandon the steamers for their own automobiles, and the new interurban Puget Sound Electric Railway moved people faster than Green’s ships. He sold most of his shares in the company in 1926.
Joshua Green developed a new interest that would prove fortuitous: banking. In 1925, he purchased Peoples Saving Bank and changed the name to Peoples Bank of Trust Co. By 1949, when Green’s son, Joshua Jr., was named president of the bank, it had deposits of $128 million and was serving 103,000 customers. By 1969, the year Joshua Green turned 100, deposits surged to $400 million. Joshua Green died at the age of 105 in 1975.
