Sometime in the summer of 1923, Joseph M. Jahns drove to the sixty-five acre tract on the edge of Bellingham, Washington, known as Cornwall Park. There he stopped his car at one of the campsites provided by the city and set up housekeeping. Why Jahns came from Follensbee, West Virginia, remains unknown, but the new autocamp in the park attracted many tourists like him. City officials remade the park for just that purpose. At its northern end they constructed a small footbridge across Squalicum Creek where it cascaded over a sandstone ledge and formed a series of pools. Identified on local maps as "Bedrock Falls," these pools and the trails leading to them made a pleasant place for swimming and picnicking. Visitors like Jahns and many locals saw Squalicum Creek as a place of play in the park because park workers had re-created the physical environment to fulfill their vision of leisure.¹

Place of play or not, the swimming pools in the park had their limits. To escape the cramped humanity of screaming, splashing children and closely nested campsites, some autocampers followed Squalicum Creek a half a mile west to its confluence with Bellingham Bay, where a public beach provided ample room for swimming as well as vistas of the San Juan Islands. To get there, tourists crossed the small bridge over the pool and walked to the road at the park’s western boundary. That road intersected a railroad line paralleling the creek. Less than one-quarter mile along this grade, tourists encountered a decidedly industrial landscape. A large railroad trestle and winch tower dominated the above-ground works of the Bellingham Coal Mines. The trestle bent down to the ground, and coal carts laden with miners or coal moved in and out of the mine on it. Below the trestle, a rail spur directed train cars into the mine site for loading. To the side of this scene sat a number of buildings, including administrative offices and engine houses, some with belching smokestacks. Workers moved among the mine's machinery as part of a huge, rationalized process. The creek was not a source of recreation here; instead it was an integral part of the mine. The water used to wash and separate coal, augmented by the approximately 200,000 gallons per day pumped out of the mine, all of it high in particulates, emptied into the creek through a wooden pipe.² In contrast to the park, at this site Squalicum Creek was a tool for the extraction of resources, a place of work.

Squalicum Creek physically connected Cornwall Park (a place of play) and the Bellingham Coal Mines (one of work). This was no casual or "natural" connection. The cultural imperatives of capitalism tied these places together.  Capitalism shaped the mental images people held of those sites: how they related to them, how they gained knowledge of them, and how they physically transformed them. Capitalism inextricably linked the ways Bellingham residents and visitors mentally and physically constructed "places" along Squalicum Creek.³

Capitalist imperatives connected and shaped the constructions of these places; however, differing conceptions of access to control and use of place reveal the competing, even oppositional, "cosmologies of capitalism" at work.⁴ Power, cultural and political, ultimately influenced the actual shaping of physical space, but an examination of the manner in which these constructions competed and co-existed points to the contingency and multiplicity of cultural constructions under capitalism. And while particular constructions ultimately predominated, others continued to exist, offering latent but potentially alternative and countervailing constructions, ready to be mobilized at specific moments.⁵

In its most basic sense, as historians Richard White and John M. Findlay argue, place is "a spatial reality constructed by people."⁶ They employ geographer D. W. Meinig’s argument that the creation of place involves "a mental imposition of order, a parcellation of the earth’s surface…into something…specific and limited."⁷ A physical process attends such mental abstractions, imposing and making tangible that order in the physical world. The resulting "spatial reality" may, in fact, be very different from the original competing mental constructions it came from or those held by different groups claiming it. Once imagined and physically ordered by the imposition of power, places do not remain static.

In twentieth century Bellingham, where the mine and the park co-existed, capitalism and power were inseparable. In his surveys of the North American West and Oregon, historian William Robbins argues that capitalism is "more than an economic system; it is a mode of production, a particular take on the world that attaches ultimate significance to material effects and the manipulation and transformation of those domains for profit taking."⁸ Capitalism is, in his words, a "culture." This culture and the "material understanding of the world" it fosters are, according to Robbins, "central to comprehending the human relationship with the [constructed] natural world."⁹ An examination of Cornwall Park and the Bellingham Coal Mines provides an opportunity to confirm, qualify, and ultimately extend Robbins’s characterization of the ways people and the culture of capitalism re-arranged and re-constructed place and places.

When Jahns visited Bellingham, the mine and the park were new. Relatively speaking, they had appeared simultaneously. The mine opened in 1918, when a group of investors leased the mineral rights from the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company (BBIC), a local investment group, to provide fuel for their cement plant in Concrete, Washington. At its peak production in the mid-1920s, the mine was one of the largest in the state, employing approximately two hundred and fifty miners and extracting over 200,000 tons of coal a year.¹⁰ Before it permanently closed in the 1950s, the mine extended westward underground for over a mile and north to south for nearly the same distance, reaching a depth of over 1,200 feet.¹¹

Cornwall Park officially came into existence in 1909, a decade before the mine. Bertha Fischer, a member of the Bellingham elite and daughter of BBIC founder Pierre Cornwall, donated sixty-five acres of logged-over land to the city to be made into a park. The mayorally appointed Park and Cemetery Board took control of the acreage but for the next decade did not commit sufficient funds to operate the park. The board funneled what little money it had into sites favored by the city’s financial and political elite, such as Elizabeth Park and Whatcom Falls Park.¹² In 1922, with dreams of cashing in on tourist dollars and a $30,000 bequest from Fischer’s estate, the park board finally turned its attention to Cornwall Park.¹³ In the mid-1920s the board used Fischer’s endowment to restructure the park through intensive landscaping and planting as well as the extensive improvement of the small municipal autocamp in the park. In spite of their high hopes, the tourist camp operated at a loss year in and year out until the board closed it in early 1927.¹⁴ But the bequest-created landscape, of which the autocamp was a part, remained intact until the mid-1930s, when federal New Deal dollars remade the park once more.¹⁵

Moments of establishment, change, tension, and even crisis can reveal some of the most fundamental assumptions societies hold and the mechanisms by which these are asserted and contested.¹⁶ For Bellingham, the period beginning in the late 1910s and extending through the 1920s was one such moment. This examination of the establishment of the Bellingham Coal Mines and Cornwall Park suggests how and why people in Bellingham re-ordered space and constructed these places. It also addresses what these constructions meant to social relationships among the city’s residents and visitors, suggesting how, even under common capitalist imperatives, distinct cosmologies can co-exist and compete.

The city’s financial and political elite used their positions of relative power to set the boundaries of debate and dominate the discourse. "Booster" literature, which is the focus of the first section, exemplifies the elite’s ability to define place publicly, at least in a local context. Capitalism shaped the definitions of place and the visions for its future that boosters put forward. These were often highly exaggerated claims, influenced more by the boosters’ dreams of what could be than by any plausible explanation of what was. Nevertheless, the second section argues that the booster vision shaped and was reflected in the physical landscape of the park and the mine. In the paper’s final sections, I expand the focus beyond the boosters’ constructions, arguing that to understand these places it is necessary to pay attention to how people in Bellingham formed multiple and competing constructions of the park and the mine and how these various "mental orderings" interacted.

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Notes

1. Jahns' walk to the bay is purely speculative. Knowledge of his time in Bellingham results from a passing reference  in the park board meeting minutes to a letter he wrote complimenting the city on its autocamp. The time and expense involved in a trip from West Virginia to Bellingham, however, suggests Jahns fit the profile of the middle- to upper- middle-class auto camper put forward by historian James Warren Belascoe. See James Warren Belascoe, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4-5, 43. Reference to Jahns can be found in Volume II, Records of Proceedings of the Park Commissioners, 7 September 1923, Washington State Archives, Northwest Regional Branch, Bellingham, Washington. Return