page_title: History of Bellingham, Washington
section_title: Mining Towns
hierarchical_section_title: History of Bellingham, Washington / Mining Towns
caption_attribution_description: English: Former bank building (Nelson Block) at dusk, historic Fairhaven district, Bellingham, Washington. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 77001363
context_page_description: The history of Bellingham, Washington, as it is now known, begins with the settling of Whatcom County in the mid-to-late 19th century.
  The name of Bellingham is derived from the bay on which the city is situated. George Vancouver, who visited the area in June 1792, named the bay for Sir William Bellingham, the controller of the storekeeper's account of the Royal Navy.
context_section_description: In 1858, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush caused thousands of miners, storekeepers, and scalawags to head north from California. Whatcom grew overnight from a small northwest mill town to a bustling seaport, the basetown for the Whatcom Trail, which led to the Fraser Canyon goldfields, used in open defiance of colonial Governor James Douglas's edict that all entry to the gold colony be made via Victoria, British Columbia. The first brick building in Washington was built this same year, the T. G. Richards and Company Store. The building, which still stands today and is being restored, later became the territorial courthouse until 1884.
  The first newspaper in Whatcom County, the Northern Light, was published by William Bausman during the boom. Just as soon as it started, the boom went bust with the miners being forced to stop at Victoria, B.C. for a permit before heading to the mining fields. Whatcom's population dropped almost as quickly as it had grown, and the sleepy little town on the bay returned.
  Coal mining was commonplace near town from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Coal was originally discovered by Henry Roeder's agents off the northeastern shore of Bellingham Bay. In 1854, a group of San Francisco investors established Bellingham Bay Coal Company. By 1866, Darius Ogden Mills purchased and reorganized the company, making it a subsidiary of his Black Diamond Coal Mining Company. The Sehome Coal Mine, just south of Whatcom, employed 100 people in 1860. Under the management of Pierre B. Cornwall, the mine operated profitably until its closure in 1878. By this time, Black Diamond had acquired a considerable amount of land around Bellingham Bay, and throughout the next 19 years, Cornwall focused the company's efforts on the sale of its real estate. The Blue Canyon mine, at the south end of Lake Whatcom, opened in 1891 with solid investment, and supplied lower-grade bituminous coal for the United States Pacific Fleet. Twenty-three workers died in huge explosion on April 8, 1895, Washington's worst industrial accident to date.  The Blue Canyon mine closed in 1917, having produced 250,000 tons of coal. That same year, the Bellingham Coal Mines opened near present-day Northwest and Birchwood Avenues.  The mine extended to hundreds of miles of tunnels as deep as 1,200 feet (370 m). It ran southwest to Bellingham Bay, on both sides of Squalicum Creek, an area of about one square mile (2.6 km²). At its peak in the 1920s, the mine employed some 250 miners digging over 200,000 tons of coal annually. It was closed in 1955.
caption: 1890 bank building in the Fairhaven District at dusk (2008).
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