BELLINGHAM

A short history of Bellingham

Bellingham has been inhabited by Indigenous peoples for millennia. The city of Bellingham and its surrounding area is the intersection of the territories of many Coast Salishan peoples. The Lummi, Nooksack, Samish, and Nuwhaha in particular fished in Bellingham Bay and shared the hunting and gathering grounds in the nearby forests and prairies. Indigenous people continue to live in and around Bellingham, particularly the Lummi, who have a reservation directly west of the city.

The modern city of Bellingham, incorporated in 1903, consolidated four settlements: Bellingham, Whatcom, Fairhaven, and Sehome. It takes its name from Bellingham Bay, which George Vancouver named in 1792 for Sir William Bellingham.

The first European immigrants reached the area about 1852 when Henry Roeder and Russel Peabody set up a lumber mill at Whatcom, now the northern part of Bellingham. Lumber cutting and milling continues to the present in Whatcom county. At about the same time, Dan Harris arrived, claiming a homestead along Padden Creek, and after acquiring surrounding properties, platted the town of Fairhaven in 1883. In 1858, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush caused a short lived population growth that established the community.

After the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, the Lummi Reservation was formed near Bellingham, and many Lummi moved to the reservation while working in Bellingham and the surrounding area. In the 1800s, Lummi workers ran river ferries and worked in the town industries of construction and logging. The Nooksack were also pressured to move to the Lummi Reservation but resisted several U.S. relocation attempts in the 1870s and remained in the Nooksack Valley.

Coal was mined in the Bellingham Bay area from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries starting when Henry Roeder's agents discovered coal south of Whatcom Creek, in an area called Sehome, now downtown Bellingham, in 1854. They sold the coal-bearing land to San Francisco investors who established the Bellingham Bay Coal Company, eventually a subsidiary of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company. After a hundred years of extensive mining beneath present-day Bellingham, the last mine closed in 1955.

In the early 1890s, three railroad lines arrived, connecting the bay cities to a nationwide market of builders. In 1889, Pierre Cornwall and an association of investors formed the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company (BBIC). The BBIC invested in several diverse enterprises such as shipping, coal, mining, railroad construction, real estate sales and utilities. Even though their dreams of turning the cities by the bay into a Pacific Northwest metropolis never came to fruition, the BBIC made an immense contribution to the economic development of Bellingham.

BBIC was not the only outside firm with an interest in the bay area utilities. The General Electric Company of New York purchased the Fairhaven Line and New Whatcom street rail line in 1897. In 1898, the utility merged into the Northern Railway and Improvement Company which prompted the Electric Corporation of Boston to purchase a large block of shares.

In 1890, Fairhaven developers bought the tiny community of Bellingham. Whatcom and Sehome merged in 1891 to form New Whatcom (1903 act of the State legislature dropped "New" from the name.) At first, attempts to combine Fairhaven and Whatcom failed, and there was controversy over the name of the proposed new city. Whatcom citizens would not support a city named Fairhaven, and Fairhaven residents would not support a city named Whatcom. They eventually settled on the name Bellingham, which remains today. Voting a second time for a final merger of Fairhaven and Whatcom into a single city, the resolution passed with 2163 votes for and 596 against.

Bellingham was officially incorporated on December 28, 1903, as a result of the incremental consolidation of the four towns initially situated on the east of Bellingham Bay during the final decade of the 19th Century. Whatcom is today's "Old Town" area and was founded with Roeder's Mill in 1852. Sehome was an area of downtown founded with the Sehome Coal Mine in 1854. Bellingham was further south near Boulevard Park, founded in 1883 and purchased in 1890 by Fairhaven. Fairhaven was a large commercial district with its own harbor, founded in 1883, by Dan Harris, around his initial homestead on Padden Creek.

Bellingham was the site of the Bellingham riots against East Indian (Sikh) immigrant workers in 1907. A mob of 400–500 white men, predominantly members of the Asiatic Exclusion League, with intentions to exclude East Indian immigrants from the work force of the local lumber mills, attacked the homes of the South Asian Indians. The Indians were mostly Sikhs but were labeled as Hindus by much of the media of the day.

Bellingham's proximity to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to the Inside Passage to Alaska helped to retain some cannery operations. Pacific American Fisheries (P.A.F.), for example, shipped empty cans to Alaska, where they were packed with fish and shipped back.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft visited Bellingham during a western tour, attending a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce building on October 9 before delivering public remarks in the city.

In 1933, the New Whatcom Normal School, a teacher's training college in Bellingham, was accredited by the state so that it could give bachelor's degrees in education. After World War II, returning soldiers used the GI Bill to attend schools like this one, and it expanded in size and curriculum. By 1961, it was renamed Western Washington State College, and it became a university in 1977.

The Bellingham International Airport was built in 1941 but was not available for public use until after World War II ended. In the 1950s, many of the industries that had sustained Bellingham were on the decline, and by the 1970s, the Fairhaven neighborhood had many neglected historic buildings. In that decade, they were redeveloped by preservationists and people in the tourism industry to keep their historic facades while serving new purposes.

In the 1970s, Western Washington University hosted some of Bellingham's first Pride events, and the local YWCA partnered with other organizations to provide services to the lesbian community. Bellingham's first city Pride began in 1999.

Also in 1999, the Olympic Gas Pipeline exploded, flooding Whatcom Creek with gasoline and killing three people. The creek and area were restored over the following years, and Washington State passed the 2000 Washington Pipeline Safety Act in response.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Bellingham, Washington, revision 1380665717 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.