By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Town founder JamesComeford arrived in 1872 to open a trading post on the nearby Tulalip Indian Reservation, and a few years later platted the town.

Historians don't agree on how the town got its name. Some say a missionary priest on the reservation named it to honor the Virgin Mary. Others say some visitors from Marysville, Calif., brought the name with them.

But the most popular theory is that when Comeford tried to name the town's first post office after his wife, Maria, postal authorities rejected it because there already was a Mariasville in Idaho at that time. Comeford Anglicized the name to make it different, according to the story.

The postal authorities probably would have had an even more difficult time if Comeford had decided to use the original Native American name, Sluppuks.