Edison, WA

Edison is a Skagit County census-designated place in the Bow–Edison area, part of the Mount Vernon–Anacortes metropolitan area. The 2020 census counted 240 residents. The community sits in the Skagit Valley’s working farm landscape, but its storefronts are unusually art-oriented: galleries, bakeries, small shops, and farm-to-table restaurants cluster along the community streets. That mix gives Edison a clear local role in the valley, where agriculture and creative work meet in a place small enough for the commercial strip to function as a shared reference point.

Edison’s history has an unexpected political chapter. First settled in 1869 by Ben Samson, it became the headquarters of Equality Colony in 1897, a utopian socialist project backed by the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth. The name honors inventor Thomas Edison, whose laboratories were associated with Menlo Park, East Orange, and Fort Myers. Edison Elementary, a K–8 school built on the site of the former high school, is the main school presence today. For someone getting oriented, Edison is a 240-person rural community with a food-and-art corridor, a local elementary school, and a late-nineteenth-century experiment still attached to its story.