The Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Vancouver on the north bank of the Columbia River in 1825 and soon moved it to higher ground. Under chief factor John McLoughlin, it became headquarters of the company's Columbia Department, directing trade from the Rockies to the Pacific. The post stood within homelands and networks of Chinookan and other Indigenous peoples whose knowledge, trade, labor, and diplomacy made operations possible. Beaver pelts were central, but agriculture, livestock, milling, timber, shipbuilding, fisheries, and supply increasingly supported a large regional enterprise.

A wooden stockade enclosed warehouses, offices, workshops, residences, and the chief factor's house. Outside stood employee villages, farms, hospital facilities, river landings, mills, and Native camps. The population was highly diverse, including French Canadians, Hawaiians, Scots, English, Iroquois, Métis families, Indigenous wives and relatives, and people from many Pacific communities. Company hierarchy assigned wages, housing, authority, and status unequally. Fort Vancouver supplied fur brigades, ships, Russian America, missions, and American migrants while advancing British commercial colonialism before the international boundary was settled.

The 1846 Oregon Treaty placed the site within United States territory. The United States Army established Vancouver Barracks beside the company post in 1849, beginning a long military presence associated with regional expansion and campaigns against Native nations. Hudson's Bay Company operations declined amid land disputes and ended at Fort Vancouver in 1860. Fire destroyed the remaining stockade buildings in 1866. The Army post expanded with officers' houses, barracks, warehouses, parade grounds, and later aviation activity, including Pearson Field, creating overlapping commercial, military, and transportation landscapes.

Preservation advocates and archaeologists identified the company fort's footprint in the twentieth century. The National Park Service reconstructed the stockade and selected buildings beginning in the 1960s using excavation, documents, comparative evidence, and traditional craft. The bastion, chief factor's house, bakehouse, blacksmith shop, warehouse, and furnished interiors are modern reconstructions on or near archaeological foundations, not surviving 1825 timber. Genuine resources include below-ground remains, landscape relationships, collections, and separate military buildings such as portions of Vancouver Barracks, restored and adapted for contemporary use.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site now includes the reconstructed company post, Vancouver Barracks, Pearson Air Museum, the McLoughlin House in Oregon City, and related resources under National Park Service management and partnerships. Grounds and some museum facilities are free, while the reconstructed fort uses admission arrangements that may vary. Demonstrations and furnishings interpret work and domestic life but necessarily represent selected dates. The site's value lies in bringing Indigenous history, international fur trade, migration, colonial labor, United States military expansion, aviation, archaeology, and deliberate reconstruction into one layered urban landscape.