The Tacoma of the North: Selling the Future of Fairhaven
Boosterism was the engine of Fairhaven’s birth, with developers painting a vision of a transcontinental metropolis on the shores of Bellingham Bay.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Nature designed Bellingham Bay in Whatcom County, Washington, as the spot for the greatest city of the Pacific Northwest. Its shores are comparatively level. On the east shore are located the towns of Whatcom, Sehome, Bellingham and Fairhaven, which are nearly 70 miles nearer to the ocean than Tacoma. When combined, these towns start with a population of about 7,000 and are practically one city. What astonishes everybody who goes to Bellingham Bay is the growth of Fairhaven. Here is a forest primeval rapidly changing into a city of broad streets with sewers, pavements, electric lights and substantial buildings. Fairhaven has been aptly called the 'Tacoma of the North' because it has the best wharfage and anchorage and is entirely protected from the winds. Mr. Larrabee, who was a large stockholder in the Boston Consolidated Mining Company and a man of large wealth, visited Fairhaven in company with Nelson Bennett last year. They finally hit upon Fairhaven as the most desirable locality for a big city and set about building it. All the streets of the new city are eighty feet wide and the alleys twenty feet wide. Today it is a live, hustling city disputing the superiority of Seattle or Tacoma in location and railroad and shipping facilities.
“The home of the Indians yesterday, the fair haven of commerce and civilization today.”
In 1890, Fairhaven was being aggressively marketed as the 'Tacoma of the North,' a future industrial titan built on a massive scale. Today, that boosterism is a relic of the era's land speculation fever, though the deep-water harbor and the geographic advantages that attracted Larrabee and Bennett still define the city's relationship to the Pacific and the world.
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