The year was 1933, the depths of the ‘Great Depression.’ Our family had just moved from the corner of the Guide and Axton Rd. to the Axton Rd. about a mile west of what is now Greenacres Memorial Park. In those days, Saturday was the day everyone went into Bellingham to walk the streets and meet your friends, shop at Kress, Woolworths, Penneys, Montgomery Ward, and simply go through our one special store, Wahl’s. Some older people would go down, park their car in the 1300 block of Cornwall Ave. to sit in it and watch the people go by. We always made this trip in our bilious green 1927 Chevrolet.

It was during these weekly jaunts into the city that I became aware of a facility at the corner of the Smith Rd. and Northwest Drive. I notice the Bellingham Herald says that the main building at that time was a hospital. The hospital probably served people who could not afford to go to St. Joseph or St. Luke hospitals in Bellingham, health insurance was not a part of anyone’s life. But the building was distinctive to us as the “Poor House” because behind it up the Smith Rd. were a series of small wooden shacks, probably with electricity but no plumbing facilities, where families lived, the “homeless” of that time not being able to pay rent. If there was ever an occasion to turn up the Smith Rd. to go to the Guide Meridian, we were extremely curious about the people we saw.

Several years later, when it had become more like a nursing home, my Campfire leader decided our group needed to become aware of another way of life. We had made cookies and were going to take them to this facility. How wary we all were before we ever got there. Our anxiety did not decrease after entering the building. It is impossible to explain the difference between the nursing homes now and the way they were back in the 1930’s, the grimness, the smell. It is still very clear in my mind as we walked down the hall, a scrawny little man with no hair on his head, dressed in disreputable shorts, his skinny little legs in a pair of dilapidated bedroom slippers, coming towards us. When he got to our group, next to me, he reached out his hand and touched my face. I was petrified. I learned that he was blind, only aware of shadows, and I was that shadow. It was years before I would go to a nursing home. Our nursing homes today are very upscale living in comparison.

Such a lot to remember, what it was like in North Bellingham in 1933 when I was making those trips each week. The Smith Rd. was simply a 2-lane gravel road, as was the Axton from Northwest to the Guide. Soccer wasn’t even an offering in the public schools. The North Bellingham School was a large white wooden house, the grocery store on the corner was there then (since 1922), and the other corner was Gerard’s Gardens. Greenacres Cemetery was not a part of the Moles Funeral Home in Ferndale. Functioning farms everywhere.

Whenever I remember the past it is always the difference in “money” between then and now. Strawberries from the farms were large boxes 4 for $1 (at least $5 now for 1 box); gasoline was 5 gallons for $1. At our house we had our own cow, our own garden, our own chickens. A stream ran through our place where we could fish. Our moving was because my father who had been following construction work, and there had been very little, had a new job attending the boilers at Darigold Creamery in Bellingham. We had upgraded our home and paid $15 a month. We had been living in the house that is still on the corner of Axton and the Guide Meridian, the rent had been $6 a month but it too had had an orchard, garden, barn, chicken house etc.. We churned our own butter, made our own cottage cheese. My mother was a beautiful seamstress and the suits, etc., that had been a part of her wardrobe when she was young became beautiful coats, skirts, etc. for me. We lived well in spite of the ‘Great Depression.’

The “Poor House” and houses on the corner of the Smith Rd. and Northwest Rd. caught our attention because the people who lived there were living so differently from our experience. That building and piece of property is truly a ‘landmark’ in Whatcom County.

Geneil Chevalier