Bellingham and Lynden’s busiest thoroughfare goes by many names: Guide Meridian Road, “the Guide,” Meridian Street, Washington State Route 539. These names reflect its status as a survey line: a straight line heading north that aids the plotting of maps and land development. Before and after its absorption into the state highway system, the Guide Meridian has been the baseline from which Whatcom County’s towns developed.
Today, essential stops along the Guide Meridian include Bellis Fair Mall, all of Lynden, and the Canadian border crossing, where it becomes Aldergrove-Bellingham Highway on British Columbia Highway 13. It starts in Bellingham at its intersection with Broadway Avenue.
The story of Guide Meridian Road is the story of numerous phases in Bellingham and Lynden’s commercial development. It spans several modes of transportation, changing with the times from horse-drawn wagons to streetcars to modern cars and buses.
Whatcom’s First Guide to New Growth
The first route along present-day Guide Meridian Road started in 1886 as a plank road. Previously, travelers went north from the 1860s Telegraph Road and other Whatcom Trail remnants of the Fraser River Gold Rush age — which ultimately intersected with the Guide’s modern route. The Guide afforded stagecoach travelers a more direct route, and by 1890 the road was fully graded for approximately $6,000 per mile. It ran five miles, then a state record for plank roads.
Today’s Old Guide Road from Laurel to north of Wiser Lake follows the original route from the town of Whatcom. Homesteader Austin Orvis built a log house there and started a ferry service across the Nooksack River in 1886, which moved nearer the first bridge over Wiser Lake in 1894. The plank road ran crooked around fir trees that settlers had never cut but built around.
The Guide Meridian opened the area to new roads running straight north — the Laurel, Axton, Smith, Hemmi, and Ten Mile roads soon followed, accounting for the map’s orderly geometric structure today.
The plank road required 80,000 board-feet of lumber to repair after a forest fire in 1897. By 1910, Lynden citizen John C. Anderson maintained and regraded it as a gravel road by tractor as automobiles emerged for transportation. Today’s Meridian Street within the consolidated Bellingham started with city government paving in 1914 and a $68,800 county government project in 1915 to pave the five miles and open a new Nooksack River bridge in time for the Northwest Washington Fair.
Developments Down the Road
Bellingham’s Meridian Street also hosted an early electric streetcar line by the late 1880s, which extended through the central business district and Lettered Streets by 1903. The Broadway Street intersection became known as “Fountain Square” for its fountain where travelers stopped for water with their pack animals. The streetcar line drove commercial growth in surrounding areas until buses and cars replaced it through the Great Depression.
In 1937, Guide Meridian Road became a state highway connected to the original U.S. Route 99. An alternate state highway route and British Columbia Highway 13 would join it in 1951. That same year, the Old Guide Meridian Bridge over Nooksack River moved to Mosquito Lake Road to help widen the Guide. The 1964 state highway renumbering would lead to the Guide’s present-day designation as Washington State Route 539 by 1970.
The 1988 opening of Bellis Fair Mall at the Interstate-5 interchange with Guide Meridian Road coincided with widening projects that gave it four lanes. These projects responded to a high fatality rate that nevertheless continued after their implementation. By the 2000s, the road gained new bridges over the Nooksack River, roundabouts, and median barriers that have reduced injury rates, although collisions have increased. Within Bellingham, the present-day sprawl of commercial outlets on Meridian Street grew around the Bellis Fair Mall.
The End of the Line
Today, the city and county governments still seek to fund safety improvements for our busiest road north. More widening toward the Canadian border and Bellingham sewer replacements are among the plans that will affect traffic in coming years. Nearly 40,000 vehicles ride Meridian Street in Bellingham every day.
In 2021, Fountain Plaza at Guide Meridian and Broadway saw renovations with a new fountain to commemorate the original. The site includes seating, murals on the utility pole and nearby building, and the 1985 stone monument commemorating the rectangular survey system that has made linear roads like the Guide possible. The greater Fountain District area has become an urban village extending to the Meridian Haggen, which started the grocery chain there in 1933.
Businesses will continue to grow along the Guide Meridian as it continues to grow with Whatcom County’s population and needs. Throughout its reputation of chaotic traffic and sprawling developments, it has also been the throughline keeping us facing our true north.
