Built 1909

This two-story brick building once housed the Pacific Grocery, owned by Peter P. Lee and his partner George Brand. Lee ran his wholesale grocery business on the ground floor from 1915 to 1956, eventually exchanging his partnership with Brand to work with his brothers Chris and Palmer Lee. The second story housed the Pacific Apartments, advertised at “moderate prices” and featuring hot water, heat, gas ranges, and “disappearing beds” that folded up into the wall to save space. The Community Food Co-op was located in the building from 1982 to 1994. Today apartments remain on the upper story, and a youth performance group occupies the ground floor.

Built 1903

The first tenant of the Maple Block was Merrin Wall Paper and Paint Company on the ground floor. The upper floor was rented as furnished rooms, by the day or week for “50 cents and up.” Subsequent tenants of the building included a funeral parlor and the Union Automobile Company, one of Bellingham’s first car dealers. The building was also used as the terminal of the Ferndale & Deming Stage Line and the Lynden Stage Company. From 1956 to 1976, Morse Hardware’s glass department occupied the first floor. The Pyramid Image Lab was a later tenant. Today apartments remain on the second floor, and the Pepper Sisters restaurant and retail space occupy the first floor.

Built 1902

National Register Listed

Robert Morse started the Morse Hardware Company in 1884 and after successfully growing his business, in 1902 he built the substantial two-bay storefront building that stands today. A clever advertiser, Morse devised trendy promotions, once staging a bicycle parade to promote the many brands of bikes he carried. When evangelist Billy Sunday came to town, Morse presented him with a Majestic cooking range and shipped it to Sunday’s farm in Oregon. As a novelty, Morse kept a black bear in a wire pen outside of the store. Upon his death on April 12, 1920, Morse’s son Cecil became store president. Currently the building awaits a new use.

Built 1930s

This wood warehouse with its unusual looking staggered false front served a variety of businesses over the years. William H. Durkin ran a blacksmith shop out of the building in 1937, advertising his services as “portable electric and acetylene welding…spring repairing…iron and steel work.” In the late 1940s through early 1950s, the Marion Logging Company used the warehouse for storage of wood trusses and other materials. The building was vacant in the late 1950s and 1960s and was used in the 1970s by the United Parcel Service. Today the building houses a native plant store and metal artist’s studio.

Built 1890 - 1891

The only commercial building remaining on State Street from the late 19th-century real estate boom is this two-story Queen Anne style brick building with a projecting bay window and an octagonal turret. The building was owned by B.B. Jones, who was born in Wales and known for his work as a mining expert with the Bellingham Bay Coal Company. In 1891 the U.S. Customs Office was located on the ground floor, and Jones’ son William lived in an upstairs apartment. The Rose Apartments remain on the upper floor today, and an upholstery shop occupies the ground floor.

Built 1936

Henry Gordon’s auto repair and wrecking business was one of several family businesses that endured for years on N. State Street. Gordon was a sports fan and in 1940 sponsored a baseball league called Gordon’s Wreckers. After his death in 1952, Gordon’s wife and son took over the business, operating until 1985 as Gordon’s Riteway Muffler and Alignment. Today the building houses a variety of businesses, ranging from a hair salon to a woodworker’s studio.

Built 1955

By the 1950s bowling had become a popular sport, thanks to the invention of the automatic pin spotter (pins had previously been reset manually by “pin boys”). The increased availability of television brought the sport to the larger public through broadcast games such as “Championship Bowling,” “Celebrity Bowling,” and “Bowling For Dollars.” Roswell Keyes’ Park Lanes was built during this bowling heyday and operated at 902 N. State from 1955 to 1976. In 1977 Park Lanes moved to 4176 Guide Meridian Road, where it remains today, and its original building at 902 N. State has undergone several conversions, its most recent incarnation as a pizza restaurant and several retail spaces.

Built ca. 1870 (demolished 1949)

The historic photo at left shows the headquarters of the Bellingham Bay Coal Company, built as the office and residence of company superintendent Captain James W. Tate. A Chinese crew from the coal mine cleared the site in 1870, and pioneer horticulturalist John Bennett planted an orchard of pear, cherry, apple and plum trees. Six of the trees Bennett planted remain today on the grounds of what became the Orchard Terrace Apartments (Site #12). After the coal company ended operations in 1878, the property served as headquarters for Pierre Cornwall’s Bellingham Bay Improvement Company and other related companies. The former Tate residence eventually became a lodging house. Today the Orchard Terrace Condominiums occupy the site (see Site #12).

This historic photo dates to 1885, when Elk Street was the main road for the early settlement coal mining town of Sehome. The forest had been cleared northward to approximately where E. Maple Street is today, but Elk Street remained a dirt road and would not be planked with wood until 1889. Elk Street continued to develop over time, and was renamed State Street in the 1920s to reflect what by then had become a major commercial corridor.

Sehome Hotel built 1887 (demolished 1929)

Architect: Jens Olsen

Medcalf Dairy built 1949

820 N. State Street was formerly the site of the Sehome Hotel, built in the early mining days with such modern conveniences as speaking tubes and electric lights. The hotel was badly burned by teenage “firebugs” (arsonists) in 1929, and in 1949 the current building was built as a processing plant for the Medcalf Dairy, complete with automatic washing, bottling and capping machinery. Started by brothers Frank and Donald G. Medcalf in 1936, the business had locations in rural towns throughout Whatcom County. After retiring from the dairy business in the early 1970s, Donald and his wife, Lillian, used the building for their Medcalf Real Estate business. Today the building houses several commercial businesses.

The view in this photo was taken looking toward the northwest from today’s Ivy Street, and shows N. Forest Street in 1890, when the south end was unimproved and strewn with logging debris. Helter-skelter fences and all manner of outbuildings lined the street, giving it a rural appearance. The white picket fence at the lower left encloses the former Bellingham Bay Improvement Company’s headquarters, today the site of the Orchard Terrace Condominiums. The Elk Street corridor can be seen just to the left of the orchard. By 1889 Elk had been paved with cedar planks and illuminated by street lights at night. The house at 315 E. Laurel Street on the corner of N. Forest Street still stands.

Built 1951

Architects: Bertram D. Stuart and Robert L. Durham

National Register Listed

The six brick and clapboard buildings of the Orchard Terrace Apartments were designed in a rustic, mid-century modern style and landscaped to create the community atmosphere typical of garden apartments popular in the 1950s. Large corner and picture windows were designed to connect residents with outdoor space. The name was derived from the “Orchard Tract,” an earlier development on the site (see Site #8). The 48 efficiency apartments ranged from 640 to 900 square feet, and most early tenants were bluecollar workers, though some were doctors and business owners and several were professional single women. The apartments were converted into condominiums in 1973 and are known today as the Orchard Terrace Condominiums.

Built 1956

In the 1890s, immigrant Norwegians, Swedes and Germans had each formed their own Lutheran churches where services were held in their native languages. Such churches functioned as instant ethnic communities for first- and second-generation immigrants finding their identities in a new land. In 1945 the congregation of the Norwegian Lutheran Church changed their name to Central Lutheran, as it had come to see itself as American rather than limited to one ethnicity. Construction on a new Central Lutheran Church began in fall 1953, during a season so rainy that one of the workers lost his boots when they became mired in deep mud. This landmark of modern architecture, its walls clad in stucco and Roman brick, was largely built by volunteer labor from its congregation.

The popularity of tulip bulbs led to the creation of the Tulip Time Festival held each May in Bellingham from 1920-29. The historic photo above shows the float of the State Normal School (today’s Western Washington University), designed by Margaret Stuart of the Art Department, which carried two large swans that appeared to be driven by Genevieve Parr and Ethel Lemen, “two Normal girls.” The float’s theme corresponded with the dedication of a bird sanctuary on campus in memory of Ida Agnes Baker, a beloved teacher of nature studies who had been struck and killed by a streetcar at Laurel and Garden Streets in 1921. Bellingham’s last Tulip Festival was in 1929. The lavish production couldn’t be sustained during the Great Depression. The Skagit Tulip festival started in 1984.

Built 1916

Architect: George F. Dunham

Bellingham Register Listed

This Beaux-Arts Classical Revival style church, with its vast portico and substantial, unornamented Tuscan columns, shows influences from Greek and Roman architecture. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy and had, and continues to have, many branches worldwide. It is a Christian denomination that believes that health, relationships, employment, and other personal and global problems can be solved by prayer. In the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the church was known as the Pentecostal Glad Tidings Church. In recent years the church has been converted to secular use and renamed the “Majestic.” The interior ballroom and dance floor are used for gatherings, weddings, events and performances.

Built 1914-15

Architect: Carl F. Gould

National Register Listed

The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) building was dedicated by Frances Larrabee and her daughter, Mary Adele, on March 21, 1915. Designed by Carl F. Gould, noted Seattle architect, the Colonial Revival style building had offices, a ballroom, a reception area and a lounge on the first floor, and short-term housing for single women on the upper floors. The basement included a “natatorium” (swimming pool). A gift to the association from the Larrabee family, the handsome structure cost $50,000, not including the site that was also a gift of the Larrabees. Founded in 1907, the Bellingham YWCA continues to offer services and programs to meet women’s critical needs and foster self-sufficiency.

Built 1902, remodeled 1926

Architect: Alfred Lee

National Register Listed

Some of Sehome’s many apartments are in single-family houses that were converted into apartment buildings. Frances Axtell converted her house into eight apartments, planning the layout herself and altering the exterior with an addition and a two-story portico. Her motivation for the conversion is unknown, but she, her husband and her sister occupied two of the three ground-floor units. Her husband, a Whatcom County physician, died in 1927. As a legislator, Axtell had a special interest in labor issues, sponsoring minimum wage and public safety legislation. She ran for national office three times and was narrowly defeated in 1922. Her election would have made her the first female United States senator.

Built 1926

Architect: Earl Morrision

The Beaux-Arts style building, with its exotic Moorish decorative touches of tiles, urns and minaret-like finials at the roofline, was advertised as “fireproof construction” (its exterior was finished in stucco and terra cotta). The apartment interiors had mahogany woodwork and featured electric ranges, and there was an electrical laundry in the basement. The units also had the popular, efficient Murphy “disappearing” beds. One of the Alamo’s best known tenants was Mabel Zoe Wilson, the librarian for whom Western Washington University’s Wilson Library is named. The Alamo continues today to function as an apartment house.

Built 1910-12

Architect: Alpheus Dudley

This stucco-clad church was built by the First Presbyterian congregation after they outgrew an earlier facility at 519 E. Maple Street (#26). In 1910 evangelist Billy Sunday held revival meetings in Bellingham, increasing religiosity and thus motivating congregants to donate labor and money for the handsome stained glass and cherrywood pews in the grand new church. A memorial window reproduces a Holman Hunt painting of Christ knocking at a door with no handle. The window was damaged when a disgruntled citizen shot rounds of birdshot into the window during an evening service. The shooter was displeased because the minister, Reverend Macartney, had campaigned for local prohibition, which did indeed take effect in Bellingham in 1910.

Built 1907 - 1908

Architect: Alfred Lee

Washington State Heritage Listed

This expansive Craftsman style American Foursquare was built for dry goods merchant Bernard Montague, who lived here with his wife Anna and their four children. The house featured dumbwaiters and a “California cooling closet,” an early natural cooling method used before refrigeration was available. The Montagues often used their large home for entertaining and, like other well-to-do families of the era, employed a live-in maid or “domestic.” With his business partner Thomas C. McHugh, Montague had opened a dry goods store in Fairhaven during the boom year of 1890. They moved the store downtown a short time later and for decades the popular “Montague & McHugh” operated on the SE corner of Railroad Ave. and E. Holly. After Montague’s sudden death in 1923, his partner went on to finance a new, and decidedly more opulent, department store at 114 W. Magnolia Street (today’s Crown Plaza building)

Built 1896 - 1897

Architect: George F. Barber (Alfred Lee, on-site supervisor)

National Register Listed

This extravagant Queen Anne was the home of Robert Morse, owner of the Morse Hardware Company just down the hill on Elk Street (#3). The house was begun in 1895, but construction was delayed so that the lumber Morse had purchased could be used instead to build downtown’s “new” Baptist Church (1895, demolished) where Morse was a deacon. Alfred Lee, the architect of Bellingham’s iconic first city hall, now the Whatcom Museum, supervised the construction of the Morse house, but the plan came from a catalog. In 1986 the house was converted into a bed and breakfast, and today it is used as student housing.

Built 1891 - 92

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this Free Classical style house is the Palladian window at the apex of the front-facing gable on the third floor. The house was built for Superior Court Judge J.R. Winn. The second owner, Harvey L. Dickinson, was involved with real estate, loans and insurance for H.L. Dickinson & Company. A native of New York, he and his wife Clara (Colvin) arrived in Fairhaven around 1890. After Clara Dickinson’s death in 1911, Harvey’s brother, Merville C. Dickinson, and wife Marian (Knothe) moved in with him. Harvey passed away in 1925. Merville and Marian Dickinson and family continued to live in the house for many years

National Register Listed

Many homes in the Sehome Hill Historic District were built by the Scandinavian millworkers and carpenters who lived in them. Immigrants from Norway, Sweden and Denmark found jobs as millworkers, carpenters and laborers in Bellingham’s lumber and shingle industries. In the early 1890s, Victorian architecture was the predominant neighborhood style, but the ornate Queen Anne gave way in the early 20th century to Craftsman style bungalows and Foursquares. Many builders took advantage of the readily available house plans found in catalogues. The Scandinavians’ carpentry skills are evident in the fine woodworking found both in the exteriors and interiors, and the woodworking shows an attention to detail and a profusion of elaborate ornamentation that is unusual for these houses of modest size.

Built 1890 (demolished 1958)

Architects: Pickle and Sutton of Tacoma

Laurel Park was formerly the site of the grand Sehome Grade School. In the late 1880s the school operated out of the second floor of the Morse Hardware Store on Elk Street until P.B. Cornwall, president of the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company, donated land on High Street for the new school. Several students were injured the year the school opened when workers clearing and grading the street outside the school exploded rocks, blasting them through the windows of the second grade classroom. The school was used until 1941 and stood on this site until it was demolished. The City Park Board acquired the two-acre parcel in 1967, and Laurel Park was developed in 1998.

Built 1919

This three-story Beaux Arts style apartment building was originally named “The Hull” after owner John G. Hull, who made his living in real estate. Mr. Hull did well for himself in the speculative housing market that followed World War I, building and selling a fair number of “bungalows” along this stretch of High Street. In June 1923, the “Hull” was renamed the “Kulshan,” what was believed to be the native name for Mount Baker. The Kulshan Apartments were rented furnished and unfurnished.

Built 1889

The First Presbyterian Church was the predecessor of the church on N. Garden Street (#19). In 1891 a scandal shook the congregation when member Annie Llewellyn was accused of “laxness” for selling whisky and keeping her store open on Sundays. She repented publicly and was allowed to remain in the church, but her daughter Lizzie (who also worked in the store) refused and was excommunicated. In 1909 First Presbyterian had a popular minister with a dramatic preaching style that grew the congregation, and funds were raised to build a larger church on N. Garden Street. The older building was sold, and the Faith Lutheran Church was established there in 1911. Later, the church was used as a martial arts school, fondly referred to as the “Karate Church.”

Built 1890

Architect: Robert W. Shoppell

The three-story Queen Anne style house was built for banker J.W. Morgan and originally featured an open tower on the third floor of the turret with the bell-shaped cap. Morgan was manager of the Bellingham Bay National Bank, which built for its offices an ornate Chuckanut sandstone building on the northeast corner of Holly and Elk Streets in 1891. The bank failed in 1893, after the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. Morgan sold the house in 1898 to new owners Louis and Mary White, who had eight children and needed a large house. It became a college men’s residence in 1957 and was converted into the Poplar Terrace apartments in 1959.

Built 1890

National Register Listed

This stately Tudor Revival style house was built in 1890 for Edward Fischer, a land agent for the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia Railroad, and his wife Bertha. Mrs. Fischer was the daughter of Pierre Cornwall, the San Francisco banker who for decades had led development of the Sehome town site. She sold the home to engineer J.J. Donovan shortly after Edward Fischer died in 1900. Donovan had come to Fairhaven in 1888 after railroad contractor Nelson Bennett hired him to complete a survey for a rail line from Seattle to the four settlement towns on Bellingham Bay. After purchasing the house, Donovan finished the interior, giving it some of its more elaborate features. Further remodeling occurred after a car crashed into the house around 1908.

Built 1906

This Craftsman style American Foursquare house belonged to George and Harriet (“Hattie”) Dellinger. George Dellinger was a realtor, and Hattie was a founding member of the Aftermath Club, a woman’s reading and social group that built its own clubhouse at 1300 Broadway, on the corner of W. Holly Street. Hattie died in 1923, but George remained working in real estate until age 97. On his 100th birthday, he took a 30-minute plane ride over Bellingham. When he died in 1952 at age 106, he was Whatcom County’s oldest pioneer. He is buried in Bayview Cemetery, next to J.J. Donovan, his neighbor across the street on N. Garden Street. The house currently serves as a halfway house.

Built 1958

Architect: Ralf Decker

This unornamented blockish brick building illustrates how buildings evolve over time. It began as a one-story brick building to house the Pacific Northwest Bell offices and plant. The original structure was expanded to two stories, and later a third story was added in 1969 (notice the difference in brick at the second story). When the telephone systems were automated, the switchboard operators were all laid off, and today the building has no humans working in it. The architect is believed to be Ralf Decker, who designed the Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company building in Seattle.

Built 1904

Architect: Frank C. Burns

National Register Listed

The Daylight Building’s grand State Street entrance is framed by two Roman style sandstone columns, topped with its name and build date carved on the lintel above the entrance. The stone was a local product from the Chuckanut Quarry, founded in 1856 by pioneer Henry Roeder. The Montgomery Ward department store opened in the building in 1928 (an arch over the basement entry on Chestnut Street still bears the company’s name), but fire gutted the store six months later. From 1976-94, an adult theater, the Green Apple, was located in the building. Today apartments remain on the second story, and commercial businesses thrive on the ground floor.