If you’ve meandered down the boardwalk between Bellingham’s Boulevard Park and Fairhaven, you may have seen a “rock” jutting out of the water close to shore, topped by a sculpture entitled “Grace.” (More on that later.)
But it’s no granite or sandstone or shale — it’s a pile of rusted tin.
In the late 1890s, the now-defunct Fairhaven Canning Company built a tin can factory on the land adjacent to the current Chrysalis Inn & Spa, said Brian Griffin, a historian who has been narrating the Whatcom Museum’s Sunset History Cruises for more than a decade.
Business was booming, so the company expanded, constructing three buildings on pilings over the water. At the end of each day, workers swept up tin clippings, collecting them in a wheelbarrow and dumping them out of a door that led nowhere but down and into the Bay.
“Over time, [the clippings] rusted together and grew and grew until they finally showed above the water, and that’s what you see now,” Griffin said.
As for the woman holding an arabesque position atop the tin formation, Griffin said the sculpture was not initially authorized — likely the work of an artist in the night.
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