Four Towns That Couldn't Agree
Near Bellingham, Washington
By the eighteen eighties, there were four separate incorporated communities on the shore of Bellingham Bay, each convinced it would become the great city of the Pacific Northwest. Whatcom, at the north end, had been founded in eighteen fifty-two when Henry Roeder built a lumber mill at the falls of Whatcom Creek. Sehome, just south, had grown up around the coal mines.
Bellingham, a smaller settlement further south, had a post office and a cluster of businesses. Fairhaven, at the southern end of the bay, was the newest and most ambitious of the four. Fairhaven was the project of Daniel Jefferson Harris, known locally as Dirty Dan, a nickname that tracked his early reputation, before his fortune improved his standing enough to allow him to marry.
Harris filed his land claim along Padden Creek in the eighteen fifties and platted the town of Fairhaven in eighteen eighty-three. He sold his holdings to Nelson Bennett and Charles Larrabee in eighteen eighty-eight. Those two men then poured money into a speculative boom designed to make Fairhaven the terminus of a transcontinental railroad.
Grand hotels were built to impress railroad executives. Population surged from around one hundred and fifty people in eighteen eighty-nine to eight thousand by the end of eighteen ninety. The railroad never came.
The speculative bubble collapsed. Fairhaven's grand hotel stood for decades before burning and being demolished in nineteen fifty-three. The four towns spent the eighteen nineties trying to consolidate while arguing over what to call the result.
Whatcom and Sehome merged in eighteen ninety-one to form New Whatcom. Citizens of New Whatcom refused to call the combined city Fairhaven; citizens of Fairhaven refused to call it Whatcom. They eventually settled on Bellingham, the name of the bay, which was the name of a British baronet neither side had particular attachment to.
On October twenty-seventh, nineteen hundred and three, the citizens voted to merge. On December twenty-eighth, nineteen hundred and three, the city of Bellingham was officially established: two thousand one hundred and sixty-three votes for, five hundred and ninety-six against.
