Bellinghistory with the Good Time Girls shares local stories about sex workers, teetotalers, rough ‘n tumble laborers, immigrants, rum-runners, preachers and more.
Andra Nordin, a guide of Bellingham’s Good Time Girls tours, stands in the rain wearing a black trenchcoat and a 1920s beaded headpiece. She grins as she recounts the grisly murder of a butcher, bludgeoned to death with an ax. As she tells the story, another guide walks slowly in front of her with a laminated photo of the front-page story.
What happened next was yet more gruesome, Nordin explained. The man’s severed head was found on the other side of his cabin to his body with a screwdriver lodged in his eye socket.
On Commercial Street, a group of students and parents huddled in raincoats gasp at the gory detail of her story. The group is on the downtown Gore and Lore Tour with the Good Time Girls.
Bellinghistory with the Good Time Girls looks at “people from all walks of life, including sex workers, teetotalers, rough ‘n tumble laborers, immigrants, rum-runners and traveling preachers, because their history is our history.” Tours include Gore and Lore, Sin and Gin and Bellinghistory, running from spring to fall.
Tours kick off this year with Gore and Lore downtown Bellingham on March 21.
Windows into the past
None of that would happen on Commercial Street last November if it wasn’t for the work that starts across town.
In the photo archives of the Whatcom Museum, Good Time Girls owner Kolby LaBree is sitting at a desktop computer immersed in her research. She types the word Fairhaven into the archive database and clicks enter.
Photographs are an integral part of the tours. A lot of the stories are tied to historical buildings, and the photos provide a window into what the city looked like at the time.
She stands up and walks into the crowded lobby. The walls are covered with black-and-white photographs. A few people are scattered across the room working on their own projects. One woman is cataloging class photos from the 1920s.
Behind the front desk is Jeff Jewell, the Whatcom Museum Research Technician. He and LaBree have known each other for over 20 years.
Jewell points toward a gargantuan book sitting on the counter. Inside its faded pages are block-by-block maps of Bellingham in 1904. This is one of the many resources LaBree has at her disposal when researching for her tours.
LaBree walks back into the quiet side room. The search is finally loaded. She begins to click through hundreds of photos of Fairhaven throughout the years. She developed the Fairhaven Gore and Lore Tour herself, and her work at the archives was crucial in that process.
When she has a story she knows she wants to tell, she conducts a much more focused search, looking for a building in a specific year. Other times she runs into a photo she needs to include.
“Sometimes I come across a cool photo and I’m like, I’m working this into a tour,” she said.
What to wear
LaBree’s hours at the photo archives are just a fraction of the work required to produce the tours; what to wear is another critical component.
“I’m actually an introvert which is weird,” LaBree said. “So I have to really get myself in the mindset and prepare for it. At least an hour ahead, I start getting ready and getting all my materials together.”
Sarah Fenstemacher is another tour guide with the Good Time Girls, and she puts significant effort into acquiring clothing for the tours.
“It takes a long time. Historical clothing is not cheap. You can go on Etsy or even Amazon has some respectable stuff,” she said. “You kind of acquire pieces over time and you just try and fit it to the tour. If it’s a Gore and Lore Tour, Victorian mourning wear, where it’s all black, is appropriate.”
Fenstemacher said she is most proud of her Victorian mourning wear outfit. “It’s like this huge all-black dress. It’s massive, any bigger and I would not be able to drive in it.”
One of Nordin’s favorite stories is the history of the Knights of Pythias building in Fairhaven. In the boom years of Fairhaven in the late 1800s, spiritualists were regularly meeting in the building.
“I just love talking about spiritualism because it’s fascinating how women could hold positions of power in the church very early on in the religion,” Nordin said. “It’s so intrinsically linked with feminism and abolishment of slavery and voting rights. I love to tell people about that because I sense from people’s reaction that it opens a door, of like, ‘I’m going to go home and look at that Wikipedia page’.”
Fenstemacher’s favorite story is the history of the black cats of Fairhaven. In the 1890s, a man named James Wardner moved to Bellingham to play the real estate game. As the story goes, he began to raise cats with thick fur to pass them off as beaver and seal pelts. Wardner’s scam failed, and he left town, but long after he was gone, his feral cats roamed the streets of Fairhaven.
LaBree also takes particular interest in this story. While growing up in Whatcom County, Fairhaven was her “stomping grounds,” and she remembers seeing the cats everywhere. This is one of the stories that she knew she had to include in the Fairhaven Gore and Lore tour.
The Good Time Girls are a tight-knit community, and they “get into so much trouble,” according to Fenstemacher. They go on group trips together, host parties and bar crawls and have weekly meetings to discuss the recent developments in their historical research.
One year, the group stayed at the Leopold Hotel downtown, a building that was originally built in 1883.
“The only spirits we found on that tour were the liquid kind,” LaBree said. We always have fun. I feel so lucky to get to have known everyone who’s been involved in the Good Time Girls.”
Despite the positive vibes, it’s not always easy being a Good Time Girl. Doing tours on the street at night can create challenges.
“We’ve gotten screamed at before. That’s never fun,” Nordin said. “One time Asia had a heat stroke and puked.”
“That was rough,” chimed in Asia Roman. “’There’s a Good Time Girl puking on the street’.”
Something all the Good Time Girls emphasize is the importance of history and learning about the community. Their goal is to teach this history to the community in an unusual and entertaining way.
One such community member was Sydney Hoffman, the mother of a Western student, and a member of the tour group. “It was really informative and interesting,” she said. “We were looking for an activity during parents’ weekend.”
Toward the end of the tour, the rain comes down even harder, and the group finds themselves in front of the Old Town Cafe. A burly man with a thick beard ushers the group inside. They form a circle, and Roman walks around with more photos.
From time-to-time staff at the cafe swear they see an old man walking around in his bathrobe smoking a cigar.
Nordin continues to explain the history of the building. It used to be an “embalmery,” and the body of a man named cowboy Jake was once displayed in the window there: His finger had been cut off and stolen for his silver ring.
“Knowing history is knowing how to not repeat mistakes,” Nordin said. “We empower our community by knowing our history, the good, the bad and the ugly.”
— By Liam Walsh
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Planning board postpones agritourism recommendation,” Nov. 21, 2025
• “Whatcom Artist Studio Tour engages community through art and connection,” Oct. 2, 2024
• “Skagit agritourism controversy is about more than weddings in barns,” March 28, 2024
• “Reliable ferry service, tourism and the question of balance,” March 27, 2024
• “Managing tourism at core of destination plan controversy,” Oct. 29, 2023