Bellingham ( ) is the most populous city in, and county seat of Whatcom County in the U.S. state of Washington. It lies south of the U.S.–Canada border in between two major cities of the Pacific Northwest: Vancouver, British Columbia (located to the northwest) and Seattle ( to the south). The city had a population of 91,482 as of the 2020 census. The city of Bellingham, incorporated in 1903, consolidated four settlements: Bellingham, Whatcom, Fairhaven, and Sehome. It takes its name from Bellingham Bay, named by George Vancouver in 1792, for Sir William Bellingham, the Controller of Storekeeper Accounts of the Royal Navy during the Vancouver Expedition. Today, Bellingham is the northernmost city with a population of more than 90,000 people in the contiguous United States. It is a popular tourist destination known for its easy access to outdoor recreation in the San Juan Islands and North Cascades. More than of former industrial land on the Bellingham waterfront is undergoing redevelopment, with plans for a hotel, conference center, condos, retirement housing, retail and commercial development. History Bellingham is the homeland of Coast Salish peoples of the Lummi (or Lhaq'temish) People and neighboring tribes. People of Lummi ancestry continue to live in and around Bellingham Bay, particularly on the nearby Lummi Nation reservation. The first European immigrants reached the area about 1852 when Henry Roeder and Russel Peabody set up a lumber mill at Whatcom, now the northern part of Bellingham. Lumber cutting and milling continues to the present in Whatcom county. At about the same time, Dan Harris arrived, claiming a homestead along Padden Creek, and after acquiring surrounding properties, platted the town of Fairhaven in 1883. In 1858, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush caused a short lived population growth that established the community. Coal was mined in the Bellingham Bay area from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries starting when Henry Roeder's agents discovered coal south of Whatcom Creek, in an area called Sehome, now downtown Bellingham, in 1854. They sold the coal-bearing land to San Francisco investors who established the Bellingham Bay Coal Company, eventually a subsidiary of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company. After a hundred years of extensive mining beneath present-day Bellingham, the last mine closed in 1955. In the early 1890s, three railroad lines arrived, connecting the bay cities to a nationwide market of builders. In 1889, Pierre Cornwall and an association of investors formed