 It was named by Virgil Bogue, a construction engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway after Cerro de Pasco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, where he had helped build a railroad.In its early years, it was a small railroad town, but the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941 brought irrigation and agriculture to the area.Due in large part to the presence of the Hanford Site (which made the plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb), the entire Tri-Cities area grew rapidly from the 1940s through 1950s.