Walking Washington's History

Bellingham

Judy Bentley

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806747
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Walking Washington's History: Ten Cities, a follow-up to Judy Bentley's bestselling Hiking Washington's History, showcases the state's engaging urban history through guided walks in ten major cities. Using narrated walks, maps, and historic photographs, Bentley reveals each city's aspirations. She begins in Vancouver, established as a fur trade emporium on a plain above the Columbia River, and ends with Bellevue, a bedroom community turned edge city. In between, readers crisscross the state, with walks through urban Olympia, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, Yakima, and Spokane. Whether readers pass through these cities as tourists or set out to explore their home terrain, they will discover both the visible and invisible markers of Washington history underfoot.

Bellingham Loop

START:	Whatcom County Courthouse, 311 Grand Avenue at Lottie Street
DIRECTIONS:	From I-5, take exit 254 toward State Street. Turn left onto Iowa Street, left onto N State Street, right onto E Champion Street, and right onto Grand Avenue.
DISTANCES:	7 miles round trip (may be done in parts)
AMENITIES:	Metered parking on streets near the courthouse, city hall, and Bellingham Public Library; restrooms at Maritime Heritage Park; Whatcom Transit Authority Station; Boulevard Park; Taylor Dock; Marine Park; and the Amtrak terminal in Fairhaven

The Bellingham loop follows a century and a half of settlement, business, industry, and education through a stunning landscape with Mount Baker to the east and Bellingham Bay to the west. The walk begins in the oldest and most weathered part of town, the early village of Whatcom, and winds through the second village of Sehome. At the southern edge of old Sehome, the walk straightens out on a railroad grade along the waterfront to Fairhaven. An optional climb to Western Washington University lifts the walker above the bay and the fray. Both walks return to the first settlement on Whatcom Creek.

Begin your walk where the boom began in 1852, on a bluff above Bellingham Bay. A totem carving in front of the county courthouse, on the southwest corner of Grand Avenue and Lottie Street, depicts the arrival of Henry Roeder and Russell Peabody, the first of many men looking for an opportunity. The carving by Lummi artist Joseph Hillaire places the men in a canoe with Lummi leaders Ts-likw and Cha-wit-zit, who guided them to the falls on Whatcom Creek, a perfect site to power a sawmill.

Walk west on Lottie Street to Prospect/Dupont Street, and cross Pickett Bridge on Dupont. The bridge was part of a military road built by U.S. Army captain George Pickett just a few years after Roeder and Peabody arrived. The road went as far south as the coal mine at Sehome.

On the north side of the bridge, take steps on the west down to the first landing to see the falls. The sawmill operated intermittently until 1873, when it burned. The Washington Colony, a utopian group of twenty-five families from Kansas, took over the mill, but it was abandoned by 1885 as large milling and lumber operations moved east to Lake Whatcom.

Continue down the trail in Maritime Heritage Park to the fish-holding pond at the Perry Center for Fisheries and Aquaculture Sciences, and find a map of the old Village Trail. The old village was Whatcom, the first of four strung out along Bellingham Bay before they joined forces as Bellingham. Follow the trail upslope to Peabody Hill, high ground above Whatcom Creek where a blockhouse was built by that same Captain Pickett. Blockhouses were a common protection settlers used for shelter at night in times of threat. The Lummi had signed treaties in 1855 and agreed to live on a reservation on the peninsula north of Bellingham Bay, but both settlers and natives feared northern tribes who raided down the coast in large warrior canoes. Besides the blockhouse, Pickett’s soldiers built a fort three miles north, which soon fell into disuse. Early life in Whatcom was precarious, as portrayed in Annie Dillard’s novel The Living. Dillard spent five years in Bellingham while writing the book.

Reach the Pickett House, set back on the southeast corner of F Street and Bancroft. Built in 1856, at the time of early settlement, the house is the oldest building in Bellingham and the oldest wooden building in the state still on its own foundation. It was built from lumber milled from the Roeder-Peabody sawmill.

Pickett House

Captain George Pickett lived in this house with his Native American wife, Morning Mist. She died shortly after their son, James Tilton Pickett, was born in 1857. Pickett resigned his commission in the U.S. Army in 1861, left his son with a local family, and returned to his native Virginia to fight for the South in the Civil War. James grew up to be an artist and claimed the family home, but he never again saw his father and died at age thirty-two of typhoid and tuberculosis. The house was deeded to the Washington State Historical Society in 1936.

You may follow the old village trail two more blocks northwest along Bancroft through the neighborhood known as the Lettered Streets, then one block northeast on H Street (another one of those letters), and three blocks northwest on Clinton to reach Elizabeth Park, a park named after Roeder’s wife, Elizabeth.

Continue the main walk into a more weathered Whatcom. Walk down E Street toward the waterfront (there is no sidewalk) to the T. G. Richards and Company building, the first and oldest brick building in Washington, at 1308 E Street. Thomas Richards, his brother Charles, and a third investor, all from San Francisco, built the warehouse and store in 1858, when several thousand miners camped on the beaches, waiting for the construction of a trail to the Fraser River gold rush. Built with brick shipped as ballast in ships from Philadelphia around Cape Horn through San Francisco, the building outlasted the gold rush, then became the county courthouse, jail, and center of social and political life. Described by historian Lelah Jackson Edson as a “tired, old building” more than a half century ago, it still sits near the original shoreline, surrounded by recycling activity.

Walk one block south on W Holly Street, the main business street of the village of Whatcom, to D Street and then an optional block west to the Great Northern Railway passenger depot, dating from 1927. The original tracks of the Fairhaven and Southern Railway were built on a high trestle over the waterfront. A long viaduct led from the trestle across the tideflats to the Whatcom Wharf. When the Great Northern took over the railway, it moved the tracks onshore and erected this brick passenger depot. It no longer functions as a station, but the Bellingham name is visible under the roofline.

Continue south on Holly to C Street. The shoreline here has been greatly altered by landfill. In 1883, the Washington Colony, the group that took over Roeder’s sawmill, built a dock nearly a mile long to reach deep water and sailing ships in the bay. In the early 1900s, Whatcom Creek was dredged and widened to accommodate the larger ships that would come through the Panama Canal, anticipated in 1914. Dredged material was used to fill in the tideflats and create industrial land. Today, C Street extends along the south side of the Whatcom Waterway on the Col...