Coal Under Downtown

The ground beneath downtown Bellingham has a history most visitors never consider. In the early eighteen fifties, agents working for a lumber mill owner named Henry Roeder discovered coal deposits south of Whatcom Creek, in an area then called Sehome, now the heart of downtown. They sold the coal-bearing land to investors in San Francisco, who established the Bellingham Bay Coal Company.

Over the following decades, miners dug shafts and galleries beneath what would become the city's commercial core. The coal seams running beneath Bellingham Bay were not the richest in the region, but they were close to tidewater, which made them economically attractive in an era when steamships ran on coal. Barges loaded at the waterfront carried the coal south to San Francisco and other Pacific Coast ports.

The Bellingham Bay Coal Company eventually became a subsidiary of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company, the same operation that had developed coalfields in King County to the south. Mining continued for a century. The last mine beneath Bellingham closed in nineteen fifty-five.

By then, the city had grown directly over the old workings. The tunnels and chambers that once ran under Sehome Hill and the downtown blocks were sealed, collapsed, or simply forgotten. For a time, subsidence, ground settling over old underground voids, created problems for some buildings and streets.

The history is still there, a hundred years of coal extraction beneath a city that now talks about waterfront parks and craft breweries. The Sehome neighborhood, named for the original coal-mining settlement, kept its name through the consolidation of nineteen hundred and three and through all the city's reinventions since. It is a quiet preservation of a buried fact: the economic foundation of this city was dug, for a century, out of the ground beneath your feet.