| Mine |
The
re-ordering of Cornwall Park and the Bellingham Coal Mines echoed the
boosters’ vision of Bellingham and the places inside it. Booster
literature posited what the park and the coal mine ought to be and
constructed frameworks for the physical ordering of those spaces. These
mental impositions represented an exercise of power over the land and
its inhabitants within a common culture of capitalism. During the 1910s and the 1920s, the physical landscapes of
Cornwall Park and the Bellingham Coal Mines came to reflect these
literary constructions. "The Latest ... Machinery and ... Methods" When boosters discussed the mine, they extolled it as a modern place shaped by capitalism. The Show Window advertised the “extensive development [that] was carefully carried out” before actual construction of the mine began. It bragged as well that the company used “the latest improved machinery and coal mining methods.”40 For boosters, scientific building guidelines, machinery to help maximize output, and an eye toward meeting expected “increasing demand” defined the mine’s modernity.41 The culture of capitalism and a vision of “efficiency” shaped and drove the mine’s creation.42 Long before the mine opened, it existed as a commodity in the minds of Bellingham’s boosters. In 1892 the Bellingham Bay Improvement Company (BBIC), the locally powerful investment group that owned the mineral rights, conducted exploratory drillings. In 1917 investors in the Bellingham Coal Mines repeated this process, but it did little to reshape the space itself physically.43 Other than these holes, the coal bed was physically much the same as it had been for thousands of years. The holes, however, were a harbinger of things to come. The core samples, revealing a large vein of minable coal, represented the imagined potential of the mine and fueled the boosters’ imagination. The 1918 opening of the mine works represented the first significant physical manifestation of the boosters’ imposition of mental order. Capitalism re-ordered the coal bed and resulted in a massive human effort to carve out from underneath Bellingham what appears on maps to be an eerie ghost city. The miners, employing a system known as “room and pillar” mining, constructed a grid-like series of structures grouped around a long main and intersecting cross tunnels. The structures that resembled city blocks on the map were the “pillars,” or the large sections where the coal had been left in place. The streets were the various tunnels that accessed them. This symmetrical system allowed at least some air to circulate. It was also a design that allowed a high degree of mechanization and the construction of large mines that did not collapse.44 The
outward orientation that defined the coal’s journey through these
passages further structured the mine as a place of work and resource
extraction. Miners,
constructing “rooms” out of the coal bed, loaded what they dug
into carts that mules pulled along rails to the mine’s main slope. There workers unhooked the carts and re-attached them
by cable to a steam engine operating aboveground.
This engine deposited the coal in a large tipple to be cleaned
and sorted before Capitalism
also helped to define the mine’s outer limits. While the end of the
coal vein defined the mine's eastern edge, a lease agreement determined
its other three sides. This agreement was not related to the actual
extent of the coal. Peter
Senuty, who worked at the mine for almost its entire existence, claimed
that Bellingham Coal Mines “had their boundary and they were not
permitted to go any further.” Capitalism did not structure just the outer walls of the mine; the roof, too, was for sale. In 1923 Olaf P. Jenkins, a geologist for the State of Washington, reported “the many new and modern residences [that] are being constructed in this region on all sides of the mine and over the underground workings.” The area, he asserted, “is an attractive residence section of town, and the mine is orderly, so that one would hardly realize that a coal mine was even in existence within city limits.”47 While Jenkins noted the orderliness of the mine's above ground workings and the growing residential district surrounding them, it was the mine itself that expanded in a subterranean grid pattern that the city of Bellingham mimicked on the surface. Development companies like the BBIC invested money in their commodified property and built houses. In doing so, they demonstrated a strong measure of faith in the boosters’ dreams of growth. The commodification of mineral rights at these sites illustrated the degree to which capitalism simultaneously defined the mine as a local place and de-localized it. As a result of one subdivision over the mine, the Bellingham Coal Mines drew up a boilerplate legal text clearly defining its claim to all coal deeper than 200 feet. In these contracts, homeowners held the right to coal beneath their houses and the developer owned minerals beneath the streets. The Bellingham Coal Mines paid a set rate to each for any coal removed. Legal language linked the right to profit from place to lines of surface ownership. This connection was not, however, set in stone. Any of the three parties (mine, developer, homeowner) could sell their piece of place. In doing so they would redefine the specific commodified area into a profit-making object that had no actual relation to the physical nature to which it referred.48 Transformed by the possibility of multiple small-scale speculators, the ground became a commodity “defined by the market itself.”49 Sufficient "Comforts and Amusements" City officials reordered the park as a place of play. This meant that capitalism did not structure its internal geography for the physical extraction of resources as it had in the mine. Beyond this distinction, however, capitalism reconstructed the park much as it did the mine. Park officials structured place at the park for many of the same reasons and in many of the same ways as company owners ordered the mine. The park, in fact, offers a clearer example of the links between booster rhetoric and the restructuring of place than does the mine. When boosters discussed Cornwall Park in the early 1920s, they described it as an engine of growth for Bellingham. In 1922 the editors of the Reveille reminded Bellingham’s citizens about the importance of providing tourists with “comforts and amusements.” They based their vision for Bellingham’s future power on capitalism. When they chastised the citizenry for the lack of “sufficient space, sufficient equipment, and sufficient comfort stations and camping spaces” in the park, they outlined the physical re-ordering of place they saw as necessary to realize that vision.50 In publicly chiding city officials, the editors of the Reveille displayed the significant power they wielded in determining the discourse. Although the paper’s editors were probably not members of the town’s elite, they were able to use the paper as a public organ to support certain projects. In the case of the autocamp, such public pressure appears to have succeeded. Less than a month after the editorial, the park board decided to commit funds to rebuilding and improving tourist facilities.51 The
building of roads and trails was a major part of the park’s restructuring. Like the mine shafts, these paths were a set pattern which park planners
imposed on physical space to determine travel patterns and
facilitate the consumption of nature. Unlike the mine shafts, the design of the park paths and roads
literally marketed certain aspects of the location in place. The paths' looping form, complemented by flower beds and sculpted
scenery, brought forward what the park board labeled as the park’s
“natural beauties,” clearly setting the park off as a place apart
from the rest of Bellingham and its industrial pattern.52
In doing so, these paths obfuscated the park’s connection to the
larger transportation infrastructure of Bellingham and the region. This
connection, however, was just as important for the park as it was for
the mine. All the roads in the park ended eventually Capitalism shaped the outer boundaries of the park in the same way it constrained the mine. Maps of the area reflected the careful measurements that surveyors took of the park and the land surrounding it. If the park itself was not for sale, the areas adjacent to it certainly were. As real estate companies like the BBIC developed these lands, they enclosed the park with houses. When Bertha Fischer originally deeded the park land, she explicitly stated that the park could not be sold.53 This, however, did not stop developers from using the park as a commodity. They speculated on the park view, just as others speculated on the potential mineral deposits beneath their homes. The scale of park-based speculation, though, was far greater than mineral-based speculation. These developers applied names to entire subdivisions that connected their locations to the park--the “Cornwall Park” tract is the most obvious example. Built in the early 1920s on the park’s western edge, this large development paralleled Squalicum Creek and extended out over the mine.54 The “Squalicum Park” development on the park’s southeastern side was an only slightly less obvious commodification of the park. Boosters and other people in Bellingham constructed the park as a place of postcard nature, but it was still connected to the nature of dead fish. It made “sense” to developers to use this construction as they attempted to profit from the proximity of their tracts to the park. Consequently, the park’s borders changed in response. By the mid-1920s houses largely filled three sides of the park on what a 1912 map depicted as un-built-up space. Ironically, that transformation gave the illusion that the park was a "natural" place set apart from the city even as developments created borders incorporating it ever more tightly into the town’s residential landscape.55
40.
Bellingham
Chamber of Commerce, The Show Window (Bellingham: Turner
Caley Company, 1921),
26.
41.
Chamber of Commerce, Show Window, 26.
42. This emphasis on efficiency reflected larger national trends. For a more in-depth analysis of these, see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement,1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 124-127. Return 43. Washington Division of Geology, Bulletin No. 28:Geological Investigation of the Coal Fields of Western Whatcom County, Washington (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1923), 28-29, 88. Return 44. Washington Division of Mines and Mining, Report of Investigations No.4: Coal and Coal Mining in Washington (Olympia: State Printing Plant, 1943), 20-24. Return
45. As Robbins points out, this type of mining demanded not
only
capital to construct the mine itself and move coal to the surface but
also the entire infrastructure necessary for the mine to function.
Having to ship coal to profit, the mine was feasible economically
because capital intensive enterprises like railroads connected it to
outside markets. William G.
Robbins, Colony and
Empire:
The Capitalist Transformation of the American West
(Lawrence: University
Press of
Kansas, 1994),
84-5.
46. Peter Senuty,
interview by Galen Biery, 12 December 1971, tape 254, Galen Biery Collection-Audio Cassettes, Center
for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Washington University,
Bellingham, Washington. 47. Division of Geology, Bulletin No. 28, 89. Return
48.
“Bellingham
Coal Mines,” Howard Buswell Collection-Legal
Documents and Papers II, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies. Return
49. In
this quote William Cronon is describing the much larger and more obvious actions of the
Chicago Wheat Board.
His basic premise, that the market subverts the specificity of
places and resources, remains. See William Cronon, Nature’s
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1991), 146-7. Return
50. “Wake
up Bellingham,” Bellingham
Reveille, 7 July 1922. Return
51. Volume II, Records of Proceedings of Park Board, 4 August 1922, Washington State Archives: Northwest Regional Branch, Bellingham, Washington. Return
52. Annual Report of Park Board to Mayor and City Council,
31 December
1922, Box 1, Park Histories and Reference Material, Washington
State Archives,
Northwest Regional Branch. Numerous historians have pointed
out park roads' symbolic and functional differences. Examining the formation of large urban parks in the 19th
century, David Schuyler argues that the "curvilinearity" of
parks resulted in a "new urban symbolism," providing "a pastoral counterpoint to the urban environment." David
Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form
in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 67. See also Stephen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History
of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 34-5.
53. Cornwall Park Grant, Box 2, Park Histories and Reference Files, 1921-83, Washington State Archives, Northwest Regional Branch. Return 54. See, for example, map 15-2, Bellingham City, BBIC Collection, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies. Park-based speculation was not, of course, limited to Bellingham. Geographer Julie Tuason argues that speculation often instigated park building efforts. Fischer's close connection with the BBIC suggests the pattern Tuason identifies of real estate companies donating land surrounding future developments to municipalities in order to improve property values was carried over in Bellingham. Julie A. Tuason, "Rus in Urbe: The Spatial Evolution of Urban Parks in the United States, 1850-1920," Historical Geography 25 (1997): 125, 133. See also Cranz, The Politics of Park Design, 161-8. Return 55. Compare, for example, “Map of the City of Bellingham, E. S.. Hinks, 1912,” map 4-3, Miscellaneous Map Collection, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, with the 1926 map 10-16, BBIC Collection. Return |
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