Among 49 official historic buildings in Bellingham, Old City Hall is perhaps most recognizable. The Victorian structure guards the downtown corridor like a stately gargoyle, its intricacies best admired at a pedestrian pace.
Old City Hall — now one of Whatcom Museum’s three buildings— appears in artwork, souvenirs and even Lego sets. It was the first building in Washington state to be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
“Being a newcomer in 2007, this building anchored the whole town to me,” said Patricia Leach, Whatcom Museum’s executive director. “And I think that many people who live here, who were born and raised here, feel the same way. It’s iconic.”
But the Whatcom Museum as we know it almost didn’t exist. Old City Hall was nearly torn down not once but twice: first when municipal government moved to a new city hall in 1939, then in the wake of a devastating fire on Dec. 10, 1962. The ensuing 12-year restoration project was fueled by extensive support — not just from major donors, but social clubs, churches, artists and even a volunteer architect.
2024 marks half a century since Old City Hall’s completed restoration. The building is both a vessel for and testament to local history: For Whatcom Museum Archivist Jeff Jewell, its continued existence proves how “the community can come together to bring back a building that seemed lost.”
Building origins
In 1891, the towns of Whatcom and Sehome consolidated to become New Whatcom. The city’s offices in the Oakland Block on Holly Street — then shared with a music dealer, clothing store and hotel — were too small to suit a growing municipality.
Thus, the council asked local architects to submit designs for a new city hall. They ultimately accepted a plan from a fellow named Alfred Lee.
Jewell said Lee had done just three buildings prior to Old City Hall: “At the age of 50, Alfred Lee — a wagon maker from Forest Grove, Oregon — decided he wanted to change his career,” Jewell continued. “And where do you go to do that? New Whatcom: Become a new man in New Whatcom.”
Given Lee’s lack of formal training, much of Old City Hall’s Second Empire Victorian design was cobbled together from architecture catalogs. The final structure, built from red brick and Chuckanut sandstone, is near-identical to Michigan’s Saginaw County Courthouse (designed by Fred Hollister and constructed a decade prior).
But Lee’s design lacked an elevator and was difficult to heat. Its upper levels weren’t operational until 1909. In the interim, city council met downstairs in the comptroller’s office, while the rotunda room hosted everything from dances to basketball games.
“It was meant to look good. It wasn’t necessarily meant to serve the employees who were doing the city’s business,” Jewell said of the building.
When city government moved again in 1939, this time to Lottie Street, there was much hand-wringing about what to do with Lee’s building. Amid calls to tear it down, pioneer newsman John Edson saw an opportunity: He wanted to fulfill his dream of creating a natural history museum.
From government office to history museum
Edson spearheaded the formation of the Museum Society, which organized efforts to transform Old City Hall into the Bellingham Public Museum. As an avid ornithologist and the museum’s first curator, Edson chose to exhibit his birds — 320 of them, to be exact.
But outside of Edson’s contributions, the museum’s earliest collections reflected community members’ eccentric interests and histories. “That’s really what a collection is,” Jewell added. “For the majority of community members, it was — is — a way of preserving, through artifacts, someone’s memory.”
Old City Hall was viewed as “the repository of the community’s legacy,” he continued. But families could interpret “legacy” as they saw fit — whether that meant donating rocks, coins, African art, seashells, stamps, stuffed cougars or simply the contents of grandma and grandpa’s attic.
“It was a hodgepodge,” Jewell said. “It was a cabinet of curiosity.”
Fire, fundraising and reconstruction
The Bellingham Public Museum opened on Jan. 23, 1941, and became a city-managed institution in 1944. Despite limited hours and heating issues, it remained open until 1962, when an electrical fire destroyed a cupola as well as the museum’s clock tower.
With no funding beyond a $4,000 insurance payout — just enough to raze the building — community members called for Old City Hall to be torn down. But once again, a passionate group of advocates rallied for its restoration.
One such advocate was an architect named George Bartholick, born and raised in Bellingham, who would go on to restore Seattle’s Pike Place between 1974–1980. He took on the restoration as a passion project after seeing the building burn. While studying architecture at the University of Washington, Bartholick was drafted as a navigator in World War II and was ultimately involved in the 1945 bombing of Dresden.
“Watching beautiful historic buildings crumble below devastated him to the point that he moved to Europe for 10 years after World War II,” said his daughter, Andrea Bartholick Pace. She feels that what he saw and experienced during this inspired him to fight to save historic buildings — starting with Old City Hall.
With only photographs for reference, Bartholick drew up plans to rebuild the museum in six stages, progressing as funds became available. Reconstruction ultimately took 12 years. Pace described this period as a “rough time, but a passionate time” for her family. Given the lack of funding, the museum’s advocates were forced to get creative.
“They fought for years and, I’m telling you, years,” she continued. “They had bake sales because there was no money to pay for it!”
Most key players in the restoration were women, such as Susan Barrow, the museum’s curator and first paid staff member. Volunteer Director Dorothy Johnson handled cleanup. Pat Fleeson, a local artist and the museum’s board president, stepped up as the “fundraising dynamo.”
Fleeson and Barrow ultimately solicited donations from names like Georgia Pacific and the Bloedel family. But Fleeson’s most impressive accomplishment involved the community as a whole, not just those with deep pockets. According to a 2010 interview with Northwest Citizen, she wrote letters to every club and church in the county, offering to facilitate fundraisers like dances and pancake breakfasts.
Her plan proved successful: Jewell said the Garden Club, for example, raised a “heck of a lot of money” and holds meetings at the museum to this day. The Bellingham Theatre Guild — whose 1902 building was also designed by Lee — put on a play for the cause, ultimately raising $500. The Progressive Literary Fraternal Club (PLF) was also very influential in restoration efforts.
“The 30 women of one club could not have done the job alone, obviously,” read a Bellingham Herald editorial entitled “When Museum Opens, Tip Your Hat to PLF.”
“But PLF did pick up the ball at a crucial time when the fate of the museum hung in the balance. This small group of women — many of them elderly and with deep and personal identification with the early history of the community — took on a big share of the responsibility for preservation of our cultural heritage on Bellingham Bay.”
The museum’s first floor reopened in 1968. When the second and third floors reopened in June 1974, the community could finally celebrate its completion. While the exterior remained faithful to Lee’s vision, Bartholick, Fleeson and sculptor Steve Tibbetts designed new chandeliers, simplified aspects of the interior and, importantly, added an elevator.
The day the cupola was attached, Pace recalled a crowd of nervous onlookers: “Everyone’s kind of watching that go up thinking, “Is it gonna actually work? … [Is] the building going to look accurate?”
But Pace knew there was no reason to be nervous. “I remember [Bartholick] doing a slideshow of photographs and overlaying a photograph taken from the same place before and after,” she continued. “They matched up perfectly.”
Old City Hall and the Whatcom Museum today
Fifty years after its full restoration, Whatcom Museum continues to develop. Leach introduced interpretive elements to Old City Hall during her 17-year tenure, including a 15-minute “orientation video” and exhibitions about the fishing and logging industries. Wider additions include a semi-permanent exhibition in the Lightcatcher building, “People of the Sea and Cedar,” which honors Lummi and Nooksack art, cultures, histories and activism.
Ongoing projects — namely the planned remodel of neighboring Old Fire Station No. 1 — will make the museum’s vast archives and collections even more accessible. Leach said these artifacts have purpose beyond historical significance: “What I think is important are: What are the ideas, and what are the ideologies that were going on at that time, and how does that transcend to the present?” Leach said. ”Because so much of it is the same.”
In Leach’s view, the most exciting thing about Old City Hall today is what’s happening inside it. Events like Access for All: Free First Friday, occurring the first Friday of every month, allow community members to access the museum outside normal working hours and regardless of income level. The Rotunda Room now hosts lectures, workshops and discussions, with topics ranging from environmental conservation to Americans’ complex relationship with race.
“We’re a safe place to have conversations and dialogues about not only our shared history, but just diverse perspectives,” Leach said. “Especially in today’s politically divisive climate, I think museums matter even more now than before.”
But even as aspects of its mission evolve, Whatcom Museum remains a vessel for local history: family heirlooms, records for old houses, even photographs of daily life from 20th-century photojournalists like Jack Carver. These smaller, often intimate mementos allow visitors to contextualize themselves within Bellingham’s wider history.
“We think of history often on a grand scale: U.S. history, European history, African history, ancient history, it’s distant in time and place,” Jewell said. “But local history is immediate.”
Stories about women’s clubs or bake sale fundraisers might not carry the same immediate intrigue as devastating fires. But those who connect the dots may discover how they fit into a grander whole.
“It’s all in the details, all in the minutiae,” Jewell continued. “That to me, is what’s exciting — details — and then once people discover that, they’re off and running.”
Old City Hall is open from noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday–Sunday at 121 Prospect St. in Bellingham. Info: whatcommuseum.org.
Cocoa Laney is CDN’s lifestyle editor; reach her at cocoalaney@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 128.
