Your Home-Owned Bank Maps the Puyallup Valley

Citizens State Bank was chartered in Puyallup, Washington on January 1, 1898, at 301 South Meridian Street. It operated for seventy-five years before merging into Security Pacific Bank Washington in October 1973. The "70 Years" tagline here pins the printing to the early 1970s — and listing Master Charge Card Service tightens that further, since the Master Charge brand (predecessor to MasterCard, renamed in 1979) only launched nationally in 1969.

The three towns named on the cover — Puyallup, Sumner, and Orting — all sit in the Puyallup River valley of Pierce County, southeast of Tacoma. The valley's flat, glacier-fed bottomland produced some of the most productive farmland in Washington; by mid-century it was known for daffodil and tulip bulb growing, berries, and the Washington State Fair — still called the Puyallup Fair locally — one of the largest in the United States.

The service list is a useful snapshot of retail banking circa 1970:

• Banking-By-Mail — a pre-internet convenience pitched to rural customers who couldn't reach a branch
• Drive-Up Window and After Hours Depository — but no ATMs, which were not yet widely deployed
• Christmas Club — a savings account where customers made weekly deposits through the year and collected the balance just before December
• Master Charge Card Service — still a selling point, less than two years after the card launched

The map was a joint production of the bank and the Puyallup Valley Chamber of Commerce, a regional business association with roots in the late 1800s. Community banks routinely funded promotional road maps as goodwill advertising: customers kept them in the glove box, and the bank's name stayed in plain sight.