Arboretum History
In the 1850s, coal-mining claims were made on Sehome Hill and two coal scouts named Henry Hewitt and William Brown who were working for Henry Roeder's lumber mill found coal. The Bellingham Bay Coal Company was founded and began work in 1855. Tunnels are said to be laced through Sehome Arboretum but their exact locations and the tunnel's entrances are no longer known. Logging has taken place in the arboretum since the 1800s with operations ongoing as recently as 1906. The land became a park in 1922 and an arboretum in 1967, with the closure of most of the park to automobiles.
Read more about this topic: Sehome Hill Arboretum
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)