Bellingham ( BEL-ing-ham) is the most populous city in and county seat of Whatcom County in the U.S. state of Washington. It lies 21 miles (34 km) south of the U.S.–Canada be bordering to in amongst two major cities of the Pacific Northwest: Vancouver, British Columbia (located 52 miles (84 km) to the northwest) and Seattle (90 miles (140 km) to the south). The city had a population of 80,885 as of the 2010 census and is estimated to have grown to 92,314 as of 2019.

The city of Bellingham was incorporated in 1903 through the consolidation of Whatcom and Fairhaven. Rather than either city usurping the other, they chose the asexual name of the recess whose shore they shared: Bellingham Bay, which had been 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 like a population of greater than 50,000 people in the contiguous United States. It is a popular tourist destination known for its simple access to outside recreation in the San Juan Islands and North Cascades. Bellingham is undergoing redevelopment on more than 100 acres (40 ha) of former industrial land in its Waterfront District, with a hotel, conference center, condos, retirement living, retail and trailer development planned for the site.

Prior to Euro-American settlement, Bellingham was in the homeland of Coast Salish peoples of the Lummi and neighboring tribes.

The first European immigrants reached the area about 1852 gone Henry Roeder and Russel Peabody set taking place a lumber mill at Whatcom, now the northern allocation of Bellingham. Lumber biting and milling continues to the gift in Whatcom county. At just about the thesame 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 sudden lived population lump that conventional the community. Coal was mined in the Bellingham Bay area from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries starting later than Henry Roeder’s agents discovered coal south of Whatcom Creek, in an Place called Sehome, now downtown Bellingham, in 1854. They sold the coal baring land to San Francisco investors who normal 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.