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Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
Free Home Page Stories & Photos
The most in-depth, comprehensive site about the Skagit
Covers from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish & BC. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness

Noel V. Bourasaw, editor

810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp

Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

Fairhaven & Southern Railroad,
Nelson Bennett and the birth of the two Sedros
Part One of Two

By Noel V. Bourasaw, Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore ??2005

Nelson Bennett, 1880s

Have you ever heard the whistle of a steam locomotive or walked through the steam from its boilers? We baby boomers were the last generation in the U.S. to experience that thrill on scheduled cross-country trains. Most of the settlers here heard and felt these sensations on their travel from back East in the 1860s-1880s and the bug bit them well. In those last decades before the automobile took hold, steam trains were the ultimate ride and transported them to the Western frontier. Just the mention of a train changed a conversation, but not always in a good way. Some, like Sedro founder Mortimer Cook, experienced the railroad scams that grew like mushrooms overnight in those days. The skeptics were finally satisfied when they saw the first Fairhaven & Southern Railway [F&S] train roll into old Sedro from Fairhaven on Christmas Eve, 1889. Most people assume that towering trees attracted most settlers to the Northwest in the 1880s, but, as you will see, coal was a major magnet.
During the F&S railroad craze, Nelson Bennett and his Fairhaven interests manipulated Sedro, but Sedro returned the favor. If Fairhaven was to be the end in this race across country, then Sedro was determined to be the means. Cook and the Sedro town fathers knew they had a good hole card. Sedro was the best potential crossing of Skagit River if a rail line was actually ever built west over Cascade Pass and down into Skagit Valley. The first real estate boom here began in 1889 because investors realized that Sedro would be the first significant town west of the Cascades that had room to grow. Coal was in great demand nationwide and deposits were discovered in both Whatcom County (1850s) and Skagit County (1874). Some people wrote off the northern counties of Washington territory after Northern Pacific Railroad [NP] chose Commencement Bay at Tacoma for its western terminus in 1873 but coal excited the local imagination again. Records from those days are slim because there were only two newspapers in the newly formed Skagit County — the Puget Sound Mail in LaConner and the Skagit News in Mount Vernon. Several volumes of the early Mail were nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1940s and the News mainly featured only one-paragraph railroad reports now and then. The sparse coverage of F&S in those early months is surprising when you realize that it became the first standard-gauge railroad line to operate in the state, north of Seattle.
The railroads were vital here for two reasons. They brought goods, settlers, investors and communication from other parts of the US and the world and they also shipped lumber, shakes, manufactured goods and agricultural crops back the other way. To understand why the Skagit river became a focal point for a railroad, we need to go back to the era before the Civil War when railroads were spreading all over the Northeast and the South. As Lelah Jackson Edson explains in her book, The Fourth Corner, Congress appropriated $150,000 in 1853 for a survey of four rail routes to the West. The task was assigned to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who also wanted expansion of slave states. He believed that the southern line alone would be practicable. The northern sector was assigned to Major Isaac I. Stevens, a West Point-trained officer who was wounded in action during the Mexican War and then resigned in 1853 to take three concurrent assignments: the railroad survey; the first governor of Washington territory, and Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Stevens began the survey at St. Paul, Minnesota with a force of engineers and scientists and requested that Capt. George B. McClellan take command of the survey.
That was the same McClellan who would be fired by Abraham Lincoln ten years later for the General's reluctance to march and move against the Confederate Army. Stevens wound up having the same reaction to the younger McClellan. Their assignment was to locate a route to a terminus at the closest feasible spot to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Thomas W. Prosch wrote in a 1908 Washington Historical Quarterly article, The Military Roads of Washington Territory, that McClellan was a complete failure after arriving in Washington territory in 1853. He failed to find the Snoqualmie Pass route from either the east or the west. Meanwhile, surveyor Abiel W. Tinkham did find it. Besides the railroad route, McClellan was also assigned to locate a wagon road route that could then be completed by immigrants. He failed in that assignment, too, and the settlers were never reimbursed for their costs. McClellan, Stevens and Tinkham all wrote reports to the War Department. McClellan's February 1854 report largely discredited the railroad project. Stevens was weary of McClellan by the spring of that year and his report was more glowing. The two agreed on one thing: Elliott Bay was the most suitable harbor but the North Cascades was also mentioned as a viable route. Twenty years later, journalist and geologist Amos B. Bowman found some of those survey notes in the NP archives. The possibility of the far northern route influenced him to settle with his wife, Anna Curtis on Fidalgo island and then found her namesake town of Anacortes. But soon after the 1854 survey, war clouds gathered, the railroad project took a back seat and Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederacy.
During the Civil War, charters were granted in 1862 to both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railways and government land and subsidies were given for them to complete a railroad on a central route. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Northern Pacific act that provided for another railroad from Lake Superior to Puget sound, this time with only government land but in generous proportions — 20 sections per mile of track in the states that the rail bed crossed and 40 sections in the territories. D.C. Linsley conducted the next survey of the possible North Cascades route for NP in May 1870, along with his assistant, Frank Wilkeson, son of Samuel Wilkeson. Samuel Wilkeson became associated with railroads as early as 1852 and then became associated with the NP line in the 1860s. He wrote in 1869 about the Cascades potential, but focused on the area further south from Skagit pass. Linsley explored the Skagit river watershed from the mouth to the North Cascades and other routes east of the mountains; you can read some of the results in the Frank Wilkeson section and the Sauk section.

The Fairhaven & Southern Railway chugged into Sedro from Fairhaven with its first passengers on Christmas Eve, 1889, just a few weeks after Washington became a state. The photo is of the launch of the first day's run, starting in Fairhaven. This was the beginning of Sedro-Woolley as frontier magnet. The boom only lasted 2 years until the Financial Panic of 1893 leveled many boom towns just as dot.com businesses are leveled now. But what a fantastic ride it was. This is F&S Engine #2, manufactured in Schenectady, New York.

The Canfield Road Eugene Canfield, a former state senator from Illinois, was the first railroad man to seriously survey a possible rail line through Whatcom County. He came to the Puget sound in 1883 as Skagit County was splitting off from Whatcom. He bought more than 15,000 acres of land, mainly in Whatcom County. He soon became a boomer of the town of Whatcom, now part of Bellingham, and he launched the Bellingham Bay Railway and Navigation Company [BBR&N], which soon became known as the Canfield Road. Like coal developer P.B. Cornwall, who had just organized the Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad [BB&BC], Canfield announced plans to build a steam railroad line via Bellingham bay to connect with the Canadian Pacific Railroad in British Columbia, and he also planned to run it along the old Telegraph road.
According to John J. Cryderman, Canfield's chief engineer, Canfield initially convinced 30 of his East Coast and Midwest friends to pony up $1,000 each for the project, with no accounting and no time limit. Edson surmised that, more than likely, he was originally backed by the Jay Cooke and Co., whose dealings led to a nationwide financial panic in 1873 and stalled expansion of the NP. Canfield ran into opposition from the start, including from Whatcom founder Henry Roeder, and his operation was always undercapitalized. After changing his planned route through Sumas to one through Blaine, Canfield organized the New Westminster and Southern Railway [NW&S]in 1888, another ambitious but undercapitalized project. When he defaulted on payments to the construction crews, the company bought out his interest and entered into a new contract with Nelson Bennett, which immediately resulted in the plans for the F&S line. Canfield sold out the BBR&N holdings to Bennett in July 1889. Canfield stayed in Whatcom, however, as he turned to banking, electric transit and wharf building. He had hoped to become the first U.S. senator from the new Washington state that year, but he lost his hearing and he died at his new house in Whatcom of epilepsy on April 6, 1892, at age 55. Eugene was a cousin of Thomas H. Canfield, also a Vermont native, who was much more successful in the railroad business as the assistant manager of D.C. railroads during the Civil War, a director on the NP board, and he invested in rail lines in Vermont and Minnesota, where he lived for many years.
Eugene Canfield originally thought he had an ace in hole that would make up for his lack of cash. His cousin Thomas was a congressman from Vermont when Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 and Eugene used his connections to get a Congressional charter that granted his road the exclusive right to bridge all the rivers north from Seattle to the Canadian border, including the Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Skagit and the Nooksack. But by 1885, when the new Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern [SLS&E]line started looking northward, the Seattle organizer Judge Thomas Burke considered Canfield's charter unconstitutional. He did not wait for a court case, however; instead, he hired a crew in 1888 to throw up a bridge over the Snohomish and laid rails to make his point and Canfield was too weak to fight it. [You can read about that event at this Journal website] According to Cryderman again, NP interests saw some value in the charter and offered Eugene Canfield $175,000 for the railroad and the charter, but he declined the offer. NP wound up taking control of the SLS&E line anyway in 1890. An Indiana native, Cryderman later became a key employee of the F&S and other lines, including James J. Hill's Great Northern system.
The years of 1886-88 were filled with reports of the Canfield Road's progress or lack thereof. This report in the 1906 book, Illustrated History of Skagit and Snohomish Counties, is an example, in which Sterling is a focal point. Sedro was not yet in the picture:

Skagit County partook with the other portions of the Puget sound country in the railroad plans and excitement which marked the closing portion of the decade of the eighties. The Skagit News of Nov. 30, 1886, sets forth the fact that Skagit valley will surely have direct communication with Seattle at some early period. Doubt was expressed as to the building of the Canfield road, of which so much was said at that time, the reason assigned being that the Canadian Pacific road would not allow any road to connect with it which it could not control. It was pointed out that the survey of the Canfield party crossed the Skagit near Sterling and followed up the valley of the Nookachamps, and the opinion was expressed in the paper that the completion of that road would make an important city out of Sterling, as well as mark an epoch in the history of the county in general.
It seems to have become apparent with the progress of the new year of 1887 that the Canfield road would not be built, and this fact gave rise to some sparring between the Skagit News and its old enemy, the Whatcom Reveille, in which the former paper quoted the confession of the latter to the effect that the Canfield road would never be built. The Reveille pointed out the fact that all the Seattle influences would oppose such a building up of the Bellingham bay country as would follow the consummation of Mr. Canfield's aims, and that therefore it must be expected that Seattle will support the Seattle & West Coast Railway Company [the northern branch of SLS&E]. It seems to be agreed by both papers commencing upon the subject that Canfield would sell his franchise to the Seattle & West Coast. A surveying party at work for the latter road, under direction of C.E. Perry, was operating in the Skagit valley in the summer of 1887, with headquarters at Big lake, near Mount Vernon, from which point parties were sent out toward the Stillaguamish and Skagit for a preliminary reconnaissance. As to the vexed question as to whether Whatcom would be on the line of this road, there seemed then no means of forecasting, but it was prophesied in the News and the ultimate connection with the Canadian Pacific would be at New Westminster instead of at Fort Hope. In its issue of Sept. 6, 1887, is record of the fact that there was much hope of another railroad extending from Seattle to the Skagit river, the basis of which hope was the purchase by Mr. Bowles of the Oregon Improvement Company, of sixteen hundred acres of coal land near Sedro [actually upriver near Hamilton]. The analysis of the coal from this vicinity showed that it was probably the best that had yet been found in western Washington.

Nelson Bennett and the launch of Fairhaven & Southern F&S was financed by land speculators from Fairhaven, which was located on Bellingham bay 25 miles northwest of Sedro and is now the southern section of Bellingham. The relatively new town of Fairhaven soon boomed, as people said back then, and grew to equal the older town two miles northeast on Bellingham Bay — New Whatcom, which resulted from the merger of Whatcom and Sehome. Whatcom was the site of Henry Roeder's original 1853 sawmill. Within just a few years after Roeder and Russell V. Peabody built their sawmill at the mouth of Whatcom creek in 1853, the California market for his lumber collapsed and the town went dormant in the early 1880s. Roeder lost part of his original investment and actually returned to shipbuilding at one point. His mill continued until 1873 when it was destroyed by fire. Another industry developed after William Pattle discovered coal in 1852 a mile and a half south of Roeder's mill. He filed a claim in San Francisco and started a small mine at Unionville, a small village below Sehome Hill. William Brown also found coal on his property in 1854 at the foot of Sehome Hill and then sold his claim to San Francisco businessmen who started a second mine that supplied coal to San Francisco for years. The combination of the mill and the mines led to the creation of Whatcom County by the Washington Territorial Legislature later that year. When the 1858 Fraser River gold rush boom faded, Whatcom's economy barely treaded water, depending mostly on the Sehome mine, but even that company closed in 1878. By 1880, only 20 white families lived on Bellingham Bay. Then in 1882, after Roeder arranged for a group of Kansas emigrants to build the Colony Mill near his original site, and by the end of the decade, Whatcom quintupled in size. The resuscitation continued in 1883 when a very unusual boomer named Daniel "Dirty Dan" Harris platted the town of Fairhaven near Chuckanut Bay, south of the main Whatcom settlement.
After Canfield failed time after time to complete his proposed rail line, Harris decided in 1887 to visit railroad magnates in San Francisco, where he offered one-half of his lands to the first railroad to connect Fairhaven with other Puget sound towns. According to Edson, the citizens in the four towns along the bay — Whatcom, Sehome Unionville/Bellingham, and Fairhaven, put aside their differences that year "and called a joint meeting where it was urged that each real estate holder donate 25 percent of the assessed value of his property to the first railroad to cross the Cascade mountains. Captain Roeder, William Utter and Dan Harris went farther, offering to make the donation 50 percent."
Fairhaven looked into the mirror in 1888 and saw itself as the fairest potential terminus of all for a transcontinental railroad. Keep in mind that Tacoma was the only Washington town back then that had a terminus for a transcontinental rail line, for the NP. Seattle was then merely a large village. In the 1870s and early '80s Seattle promoters planned rail lines to Walla Walla and points east, but tracks were actually only completed to the sites of the Newcastle coal mines in eastern King County. Nelson Bennett envisioned an ultimate goal to build a line towards the Cascades that would impress Great Northern owner James J. Hill enough to influence his choice of a route to the coast. A 1993 Fairhaven Gazette article noted that, during an interview with a Seattle reporter, Bennett "jabbed at the air with his new ten dollar fountain pen, saying, 'Where will be the terminus? I have got one eye on the Arctic Circle and the other on the Antarctic. I have not decided whether we will run through Blaine or not."
When Bennett showed up in 1888 and stated his purpose of constructing a railroad to the Skagit river coal mines, many Whatcom landowners assumed that he represented James J. Hill, owner of the transcontinental railroad that would soon be known as the Great Northern. They knew that Hill had surveyors in the field as far west Spokane Falls as his construction crews approached the Rockies on their way west from the Great Lakes. Actually, no one knows if Bennett had made such a deal by then, even though F&S did sell out to Hill two years later. The town boosters offered Bennett land inducements along the rail right-of-way through Happy Valley, east of Fairhaven, but they did not give away the store. They imposed a strict deadline of Christmas Day, 1889, for completion of the F&S line all the way to the Skagit river. Rumors flew that Hill favored the Skagit pass — or Ward's pass as it was then often called, to reach the Sound; other names in various newspapers included Cascade pass or Sauk pass. If Bennett et al could beat the deadline, he and his fellow investors would collect a bonus of additional land in Fairhaven and exclusive rights to market land in old Sedro. Captain Edward Eldridge, another Whatcom father, led a group of citizens from Fairhaven who guaranteed a $200,000 bonus worth of land around the right of way and Mortimer Cook and other landowners at Sedro led a group who guaranteed the blocks around the Sedro tracks

Bennett lured investors Unlike Canfield, Bennett had real money behind him. From his experience of building right-of-way for the NP, Bennett knew that investors needed more than a paper railroad to convince them to empty their wallets. He took the written inducements with him and visited wealthy friends all over the Northwest who looked for boomtown investment. Two of the key investors were James F. Wardner, who made his fortune in Idaho silver mines [see Journal website], and C.W. Waldron, a banker from Michigan. He also attracted Charles Xavier "C.X." Larrabee, who made a fortune at Butte City, Montana, after developing the Anaconda and St. Lawrence mines and the Mountain View copper mine. After selling those interests in 1887, he invested heavily in Portland real estate and then joined Bennett in Fairhaven. The Skagit coal mines near Sedro [see Part Two] may have been a major attraction for Larrabee because he bought the majority interest in them. Bennett first capitalized the Fairhaven Land Company (FLC) for $250,000 on Nov. 26, 1888. A month later, Bennett and C.X. Larrabee and his brother, Samuel E. Larrabee, incorporated the Fairhaven & Southern Railway on Dec. 22, 1888, along with investors E.M. Wilson, E.L. Cowgill. Wilson was a capitalist who also backed the Olympia and Tumwater Railway Light and Power Co. in 1889, and in 1895 he would join engineer Bert Huntoon in the first official survey of a possible wagon road over the North Cascades. That was the first step towards the present Highway 20, which finally opened in 1972. A newspaper in Whatcom dubbed the new company "the Liverpool-New York-Whatcom-Yokohama run." They announced their plan to build a line to the Canadian border and to the Columbia river over Ward's pass. C.X. Larrabee, the largest shareholder, became president of the corporation. FLC soon also acquired the Kansas Colony Mill holdings and built a wharf out into Bellingham bay just to the north of Canfield's G Street wharf. At the same time, he backed other companies that built coal bunkers at the Fairhaven waterfront. Other investors and settlers packed Fairhaven by late 1889 and the term equity gained fashion. For example, in the 1970 book, Booming and Panicking on Puget Sound, financier George Bacon explained that an investor would put $500 down on a group of lots with a paper value of $2,000. As the town boomed, values increased rapidly to $5,000 or more and he called his profit, equity.
As you will see, Nelson Bennett was a very punctual person and that trait paid off in cash more than once. Bennett's contemporaries described him as "a man of strong physique, big broad shoulders, wide forehead, strong farseeing eyes, and like most men of his day, he wore both beard and mustache." The late historian Murray Morgan describes him as being five-feet-nine in height and almost as wide, and Lottie Roeder Roth described him in her 1926 book, History of Whatcom County, "Put a mustache and goatee on a bulldozer and you would have a reasonable facsimile." Nelson and his brother Sidney and engineer John J. Donovan were known as "big powder men" from their work on construction projects for NP across the mountain states. Their first major deadline was set on Feb. 13, 1886, when they won the contract to construct the Stampede Pass tunnel through the Cascades for the NP. They completed the project on time, 27 months later, on May 3, 1888, and the Bennetts pocketed $250,000 in profit from the $1,000,000 project. [In an upcoming issue of the Journal we will feature a story about how the Bennett brothers blasted the Stampede Pass tunnel.]
A descendant of C.X. Larrabee shared the Summary Statement for the F&S, which was compiled through May 29, 1889, and gives valuable insight into the scope of investments and disbursements during the first five months of this very expensive line. Grading started in April and by May the crews were building southeast toward Sedro. The total investment to that time was $126,418, of which C.X. and his brother extended the largest share, $110,000, about 87 percent. Bennett's share was $7,065 and E.M. Wilson, the treasurer and general manager, invested $9,354. Bennett's expertise was obviously worth a bundle. The largest disbursement by far was $43,684 for 941 tons of steel rails and $6,541 for fastenings. Two 4-6-0 standard-gauge locomotives from Schenectady, New York, were purchased for $18,461. The initial passenger cars, from a plant in Detroit, Michigan, cost $11,397. They were painted olive green and had a broad blue stripe down their sides. The excursion cars were truly deluxe with cushioned seats on both sides of the coach and reclining and revolving chairs down the middle. The equipment was state of the art for those days, as modern as any railroad back East. Engineering expenses totaled $6,845 and construction crews were paid $4,746. The difference between the F&S books and the paper railroads of the time showed in the cash balance of $26,836 held by agent A.P. Fisk, and $1,107 in the checking account at Merchants National Bank in Tacoma. Part pitchman, Bennett put on quite a show in the winter of 1888-89. When the locomotives were first shipped to Fairhaven, they were installed on a short stretch of track constructed near the wharf, where FLC promoters ran them up and down the tracks, with steam puffing and whistles blowing, to show off for potential investors and passengers.
Frank Wilkeson knew the Bennett brothers from their work for NP. In the March 2, 1890, New York Times, he profiled Nelson Bennett:

Nelson Bennett, who founded Fairhaven when he was much younger than he now is, was engaged in transportation on the great plains---that is the way his admirers state the case, but really he was an ox or mule driver who, blacksnake whip in hand, walked in dust clouds from Missouri River steamboat landings to the Rocky Mountains. Bennett was plucky; he was energetic; he hated idleness. He is highly intelligent. He does not lie, and he has never been known to desert a friend. When he was young in the business of driving oxen across the plains he saw the enormous profits derived from the overland trade, and presently he was driving his own teams and selling his own goods. Then, as railroads were extended into desert and highlands, and wagons were pushed from the trails, Bennett began to contract to build railroads. He built railroads in the Rocky Mountains, on the Great Plains, in the arid basin that is between the Rocky and Cascade Mountains, and in the latter range. He blasted the long tunnel through the Cascade Mountains, through which the Northern Pacific's cars roll when on their way to and from Puget Sound. Every contract he undertook he fulfilled and made money in blocks at the work. He became thoroughly familiar with the whole country west of the Missouri River. . . .
When the Cascade Tunnel was completed, Nelson Bennett thought his time had come. Familiar with the building of Tacoma and Seattle, and with the undeveloped resources of the country tributary to those important towns---resources which the inhabitants of those towns have resolutely refused to develop---he, after much consideration, concluded that they did not occupy commerce-commanding sites and that, if a manufacturing city could be established on a good harbor and close to the sea, it would speedily overshadow the towns that stand at the head of Puget Sound. This conclusion arrived at, he acted at once. His subordinates, snappy, brainy young men, were summoned. They came. Engineers from the plains and highlands, railroad builders from the forests, managers of stores, real estate experts, miners, and timberland examiners. A council was held, and a decision was arrived at speedily. Then the men were dispatched, some into the highlands to search for coal and iron ore and veins of gold and silver ore, others with barometers strapped on their backs were sent to search for routes for a railroad, others to examine the forests to estimate the amount of marketable timber it contained, others to watch and measure the sweep of the tide through narrow passages adjacent to rival sites and to examine harbors. Presently gaunt men, toilworn and haggard and bowed under heavy burdens, emerged from the dense forests that stand on the western flanks of the Cascade Range. This man bore silver ore, that one iron ore, and in the third man's sack was coking coal. That group of worn, tired-eyed men were from the Skagit Pass, below them on a floating dock stood a group of leg-weary men, the pockets of whose tattered coats bulged with note books that were stuffed with information relative to the quality of the timber and the character of the soil of half a State. Out of forests, off of sweeping tide waters, out of mountain passes, from the plains east of the Cascade Mountains, from probable rival town sites, men hurried to Tacoma and to Nelson Bennett's office. The information which was to determine the site of a city was gathered. It was carefully studied and laboriously compared and weighed. Slowly the evidence was sifted. A map was made, and the resources of the country that had been examined was marked on it. This point was rejected because of its harbor, that because the tributary land was not arable when cleared, and another because it was too far from coal and iron deposits. Finally it was decided that the new city should be built on the shore of Bellingham Bay. When this conclusion was arrived at, to act followed instantly.
For the building of a town in 1889 land was bought for a very large sum of money, hundreds of men were employed to chop and burn the trees that stood on the town site, the town was laid out, a wharf was built, a steamboat was built to ply between Tacoma and Fairhaven, which is the ill-chosen name of the new town; a railroad was projected and engineers located it, and hundreds of men began to build the grade. Locomotives and cars and steel rails were bought and delivered at Fairhaven, and presently trains of loaded cars departed at short intervals from Fairhaven's wharf. I will here say that Nelson Bennett's railroad, the Fairhaven and Southern, is the best-equipped railroad in the land. All cars are equipped with air brakes and automatic couplings. No brakeman's hand will ever be smashed on this road. An electric light and power company was incorporated and began work at once. A water company was formed, and in April the water mains will be filled with water from a mountain lake. Forty men are driving gangways and turning rooms on two immense seams of coal that are twenty-five miles from town, preparatory to supplying the Pacific coast with cheap fuel. Other men work at the silver mines in the Skagit Pass.

Bennett proceeded to purchase 190 acres of the original Fairhaven plat from Dan Harris for $40,000 by April 9, 1889. He also bought the Colony Mill holdings a mile north in New Whatcom. Harris may have profited the best of anyone in this venture. A bachelor known for his eccentric habits and his lack of personal hygiene, he moved to Los Angeles, probably laughing all the way, and married well.

John J. Donovan

Albert G. Mosier's 1891 map of old Sedro by the Skagit. The "wye" of the Fairhaven & Southern railroad was located at Jameson avenue, which was also the eastern extension of what was called the county highway at the time, a loose term to say the least. The left tine of the fork was the rail line coming southeast from Fairhaven and the right tine was the line going northeast and then north to the Cokedale mines. That is now Railroad street and the Minkler or Lyman highway. You can see Mortimer Cook's wharf on the river, which was the ultimate terminus of the rail line. That is where the town began in 1885.

Besides attracting his influential and wealthy friends to attract in Fairhaven, Bennett also tapped lesser worthies for special responsibilities. The key man in his F&S operation was 30-year-old John Joseph Donovan, who would remain on the bay long after Bennett and other investors who bailed out during the nationwide Depression that started in 1892-93. Donovan, who would later become a principal in the Blue Mountain Coal Co. on Lake Whatcom, a famous lumberman with Julius Bloedel, and a partner in several other industries that built the town of Bellingham, originally started work for Nelson Bennett as a rodman/surveyor on NP construction crews in Montana. He was born on Sept. 8, 1858, in Rumney, New Hampshire, to Irish immigrant parents. His father was a foreman on a railroad there and his mother died young. His three siblings never moved away from New England. Like many immigrant parents, the elder Donovans knew the value of education and they provided for their son to graduate from the common schools and then helped him attend the state Normal school, where he graduated in 1877. He then taught for three years in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, just long enough to save for attending graduate school at Worcester Polytechnic Institute at Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated in 1882 with a major in surveying and civil engineering, valedictorian of a class of thirty-one.
In July of that year he moved West and was hired on by NP on a construction crew in Montana. His advancement was rapid; he began as a rodman, then leveler, and in six months was made assistant engineer. J. Q. Barlow, a classmate of Mr. Donovan, was assistant engineer in charge of adjacent work; he would later also make his mark in Washington. They both worked at Gold Creek, Montana, in September 1883, when the golden spike was driven to celebrate completion of the NP line to Washington territory, even though the route was not yet continuous to Tacoma. Two months later, after completing the construction of several truss bridges, young Donovan came to Washington territory and began work on the Cascade division of the NP at the town of Prosser in the Yakima valley. For the next four years he worked as locating engineer and engineer-in-charge of track and bridges as the NP completed a switchback, hairpin route over the mountains so that it was no longer necessary to send trains around by the way of Portland. Then, when the Bennett brothers built the tunnel through the Cascades, Donovan worked with them in 1886-87 as the engineer in charge of the Cascade Division-west before he supervised rail crews in Montana.
In April 1888, Donovan returned to New England and married Clara Nichols, and they moved to Tacoma for their honeymoon. In May, Bennett called on Donovan for the F&S project. Donovan accepted the offer and arrived in Fairhaven to find a few shacks with mere trails to connect them. In the 1903 book, A History of the Puget Sound Country, author Col. William F. Prosser (the founder of Prosser, Washington) wrote: " . . . in December 1888, he brought his wife to the incipient village of Fairhaven and built a house in what was then almost a wilderness. There was no store of any description or a graded street, and for the commonest necessity they had to take a rowboat for Whatcom, the connecting road through the forest, where Front street now runs, being almost impassable." As far as we know, Donovan was no relation to Charley "Silk Stocking" Donovan, who arrived at Sehome 15 years earlier as a telegrapher.

This drawing of the Fairhaven & Southern depot in old Sedro is the only illustration we have from this perspective, looking east from McDonald avenue, the only business block in old Sedro. In other Sedro stories linked below, you can see the perspective looking north from Cook's wharf. The depot was described in various contemporary articles as being the most modern and attractive in the state at the time. The drawing was published in the Washington Magazine August 1890 issue, which you can see in the University of Washington Library archives..

Earlier in 1888, while he was still negotiating with the Fairhaven interests, Bennett assigned Donovan to survey all the possible rail routes west from the Cascade foothills. Donovan explored routes to three potential termini: Bowman's Anacortes (actually Ship Harbor, the present San Juan Islands & International ferry connection); Samish Point — which Donovan initially favored; and Fairhaven. Bennett preferred Fairhaven because of the deeper harbor there; Samish Bay was much too shallow for the ships that would carry U.S. goods to the Orient. Ward's pass in the north Cascades was also still feasible as a route for the Great Northern. Donovan probably explored the Cascades region with his Massachusetts classmate J.Q. Barlow, who would soon be associated with the Monte Cristo mines and the Everett and Monte Cristo Railway and would be the namesake of Barlow Pass in that region. In a March 3, 1924, interview with the Bellingham Herald, Donovan recalled that:

Samuel Hill, son-in-law of J.J. Hill, famous railroad builder, had told him a few years ago the reason why the Great Northern railroad was built into Everett instead of Bellingham. Mr. Hill said he and his father-in-law had sat up all night trying to decide the point and finally selected the southern route because it was possible to build a switchback at Stevens pass, whereas Sauk pass, which would have brought the railroad down the Skagit, afforded no such engineering possibility. He recalled that the chief engineer of the Great Northern [maybe Stevens?], convinced that Fairhaven would be the terminus of the Great Northern, had paid $100 a front foot for twenty-five lots in Fairhaven before the decision was made.

While in Skagit County, Donovan also explored a route for Bennett's projected second phase, planned to cross the Skagit at Sedro and continue south along the west side of Clear Lake — then called Mountain View, and the east side of Big Lake. We know that Bennett was serious enough about that plan that he platted the town of Montborne on the east side of Big Lake that year. It was located down the slope from where the Big Lake Bar & Grill stands today. Another key Bennett employee was John J. Cryderman, who joined the F&S crew after the Canfield Road folded. He also worked in siting the Skagit County part of the line and then he was hired by the Oregon Improvement Company, which built the Seattle & Northern [S&N] east from Anacortes into Woolley, the town north of Sedro, in 1890. That was the second line to enter P.A. Woolley's new company town.

Continue on to part two, where you will learn about Skagit County and Sedro's preparation for the first standard-gauge railroad in the state north of Seattle, including: how the two towns of Sedro boomed almost overnight in 1889; how developer Norman R. Kelley almost brought the project to a halt at the last moment and how John J. Donovan rode through a snowstorm to defeat Kelley's injunction; and details about how the F& went into decline and disappeared by the turn of the 20th century. Donovan's ride alone will remind you of an old-time, silent Western movie.

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Story posted July 20, 2001, last updated Feb. 6, 2006

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Fairhaven & Southern Railroad, Nelson Bennett and the birth of the two Sedros Part One of Two

Fairhaven & Southern Railroad,
Nelson Bennett and the birth of the two Sedros
Part One of Two