Education
Workshops, peer mentoring, and practical advisories drawn from the working knowledge of long-running members — the kind of learning that doesn’t come from a webinar.
Examples: marketing roundtable · sales-tax clinic · hiring workshopIndependent businesses, coming together to serve a thriving, close-knit community through connection — in the historic prairie town between the Puyallup and Carbon rivers.
Workshops, peer mentoring, and practical advisories drawn from the working knowledge of long-running members — the kind of learning that doesn’t come from a webinar.
Examples: marketing roundtable · sales-tax clinic · hiring workshopMonthly mixers, one-to-one introductions, the member directory — and the everyday running into each other on Washington Avenue that turns acquaintances into referral sources.
Examples: monthly mixer · member spotlight lunch · directory listingHoliday tree lighting on Calistoga, the downtown trick-or-treat, sandwich-board ordinance work with the city — the small advantages a row of storefronts can only earn together.
Examples: tree lighting · trick-or-treat · downtown beautificationFrom the year-round member calendar to the spring weekend that puts Orting on the map — the OBA helps stage the Bridge Street section of the Daffodil Parade, on the route since 1934.
Examples: monthly mixer · Daffodil Parade · annual member meetingWilliam Henry Whitesell, Thomas Headley, Daniel Lane, and Daniel Varner filed the first recorded land claims on what was then called Gunson’s Prairie. Their names — Whitesell, Headley — live on as Orting streets today.
A Northern Pacific Railway superintendent renamed the area from “Carbon” to “Orting” — said to be an indigenous word meaning prairie — while building the line out toward the coal towns of Wilkeson and Carbonado.
On April 22, 1889, Orting was officially incorporated. Hop farms, dairies, and railroad commerce powered the early economy — the foundation a downtown was laid on top of.
The Daffodil Parade begins as a tribute to the valley’s agriculture industry. From its first year, Orting has been one of four cities on the route — alongside Tacoma, Puyallup, and Sumner. The parade has run every year since, with breaks only for the war (1943–45) and the pandemic (2020).
The Orting Business Association is the working partnership of today’s independent businesses — the cafes, trades, professional services, and family farms keeping a 19th-century downtown alive in the 21st. We are still doing what every association in this town has done since the railroad came: keep the doorbell ringing.
Orting sits at the confluence of the Puyallup and Carbon rivers, about thirty miles north of Mt. Rainier — close enough that the mountain frames every photograph taken on Bridge Street, and that the town is, in geological terms, on the lahar evacuation route from one of America’s most-watched volcanoes. We try not to dwell on it.
The valley was first claimed in 1854 and the town renamed by a railway man in 1877. By the 1890s, hop farms and a daffodil-bulb economy had taken hold. The Washington Soldiers Home, founded in 1891, brought veterans and their families to the town and remains the oldest such institution in the state. Coal trains rolled through on their way down from Wilkeson; daffodil floats roll through every spring on their way through the valley.
The OBA exists in that long tradition: a working partnership of the people who chose, year after year, to keep this place a downtown.
Sources: Wikipedia, The Daffodil Festival, OBA.
OBA membership is open to any independent business operating in or serving the Orting community. Members get a directory listing, the monthly mixer, the educational programming, and a working voice in the events that shape downtown.