Ferndale: From Logjam to Town
Near Bellingham, Washington
Ferndale owes its existence to an enormous logjam. As the story goes, an early settler named Tawes was paddling up the Nooksack River when a wall of tangled timber forced him ashore. He liked what he saw and stayed.
Others followed, and by eighteen seventy-nine the Rogers brothers were running a general store at the spot, turning it into a trading post for the valley. Early residents simply called it Jam, for obvious reasons. The local schoolteacher thought that undignified, and renamed the place Ferndale for the ferns that crowded the original schoolhouse clearing.
The first train arrived in eighteen ninety-one, and the town was officially incorporated in nineteen oh seven. Ferndale's logjam, the thing that stopped travelers in their tracks, is the reason anything grew here at all.
