Blaine: Named for a Losing Candidate
Washington
The town you are approaching began life as Semiahmoo, a scrappy seaport clustered around Drayton Harbor where gold seekers bound for British Columbia came to resupply. The Cain family replatted the townsite and renamed it Blaine, after James G. Blaine, the Republican senator from Maine who had just lost the presidential election to Grover Cleveland.
The Cain brothers built the biggest store north of Seattle, a shingle mill, a hotel touted as the largest in the state, and the first public wharf. Incorporated in eighteen ninety, Blaine remained a fishing and logging hub until the highway age recast it as a border crossing. Today it still carries the name of a man who never won the White House.
