 An annexation in 2010 increased the city's population significantly, and as of 2019 the population was an estimated 51,500.Settlement in the Burien area dates to 1864, when George Ouellet (1831–1899), a French-Canadian born in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, Quebec, purchased his first of several land patents for homestead sites directly from a federal land office.Ouellet had first arrived in the Washington Territory at Port Madison on Bainbridge Island, off the Kitsap Peninsula, in 1858.