City of Lynden Whatcom County, Washington

Name: City of Lynden
Address: Washington

Mapped Location

City of Lynden: The mapped location is an approximation and should not be used for navigation or wayfinding.

Information

General information on City of Lynden

Feature Type: Incorporated

Official, historical, colloquial and alternative toponyms for City of Lynden

A brief list of names that this geographic feature has been named

Name	Description
City of Lynden	Official
Lynden	Official

Origin Notes and History of City of Lynden

References to City of Lynden that document the origin of its place name

LYNDEN, a town in the northern part of Whatcom County. It was named in 1870 by Mrs. Phoebe N. Judson, the first white woman living in Whatcom County north of Bellingham. She liked the name in the old poem "On Linden when the sun was low" and changed the "i" to "y" as she thought it made a prettier name. (Phoebe Newton Judson, in Names MSS., Letter 187.)

Edmond S. Meany in Origin of Washington Geographic Names

Meany, Edmond S., Origin of Washington Geographic Names, 1923 University of Washington, pp 153 | Origin of Washington Geographic Names

A Selected Bibliography of City of Lynden, Whatcom County, Washington

A compilation of essential readings detailing the history, geography, and culture of the region.

Portrait of Lynden by Dorothy Koert

Portrait of Lynden chronicles the grueling agricultural transformation and isolated pioneer settlement situated within the flood-prone river corridors and dense lowland forests of northwestern Washington. Koert details how the region's formidable physical barriers—specifically the towering, impenetrable old-growth timber of the Nooksack River valley, the waterlogged, marshy soils, and the unpredictable, heavy maritime precipitation—strictly dictated the margins of early human survival and agrarian expansion. By mapping the immense physical labor required to painstakingly extract massive cedar and fir stumps from the damp earth and to engineer vital drainage networks across the floodplain, the narrative highlights the monumental cooperative effort necessary to forcibly convert this dense temperate rainforest into highly productive dairy and agricultural pastureland. The absolute geographic isolation from the deeper marine ports of Puget Sound initially forced these remote homesteaders into a strict reliance on the precise topography of the Nooksack River for early transportation, completely anchoring their commercial existence and tightly knit community structure to the severe hydrological realities of the river basin. Ultimately, this civic and historical record serves as a deeply localized spatial history, demonstrating how the extreme physical labor, dense forested topography, and specific riverine geography of this Pacific Northwest frontier fundamentally shaped the fiercely resilient, strictly agriculturally dependent character of the Lynden settlement.

163 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Non-circulating [ 1 ]

Genealogy · 1st Edition · Lynden Tribune, Lynden, Wash., 1976
Related Catalog Items: City of Lynden · Whatcom County

Whatcom County

Political Boundaries

Last updated: 2017-06-26