Qualla: Hovander Homestead Park

Hovander Homestead Park: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jadzden, CC BY-SA 4.0. The wood soaked for two years before anyone drove a nail into it. In June 1899, Hokan Hovander finished the plans for his farmhouse on the Nooksack River and ordered 52,000 board feet of fir and cedar, then put the whole order into linseed oil and left it to cure. It was a Swedish practice, and it was slow, and it worked: the house was finished in 1903 and the timber has not needed treatment since. More than a century and two floods' worth of river later, the building still stands on its raised platform above the flood land, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man who designed it.

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Image: Jadzden | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hovander Homestead Park: Sixty Acres and Two Log Cabins

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA, CC BY 2.0. Hovander was an architect and bricklayer who came from Sweden and first settled in Seattle, then decided that what he wanted was farmland. In 1898 he arrived in Ferndale, in Whatcom County near the Canadian border, and paid $4,000 to Betsey Nielson for sixty acres on the Nooksack...

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Image: Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA | CC BY 2.0

Hovander Homestead Park: A Swedish House on American Flood Land

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jadzden, CC BY-SA 4.0. It was common practice among Northwest settlers in the late nineteenth century to build in the architectural idiom of wherever they had come from, and Hovander built Swedish. The house has large open rooms with windows and doorways proportioned to the space rather than to a catal...

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Image: Jadzden | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hovander Homestead Park: Leontine's Kitchen

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA, CC BY 2.0. Leontine Hovander had trained as a cook in Sweden, and on a working farm that skill was infrastructure. She fed the family and the hired hands, day after day through planting and haying and slaughter. Swedish custom held that a farm wife took over management whenever her husband ...

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Image: Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA | CC BY 2.0

Hovander Homestead Park: What Tuberculosis Took

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not long after arriving, Hovander began building a Holstein dairy herd out of the twelve cows that came with the homestead. By 1919 it was over fifty head. That year the entire herd contracted tuberculosis from a source nobody identified, and all of it had to be destroyed — a lif...

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Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hovander Homestead Park: The Tools Are the Family's

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Truth Is King 24, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1969 Whatcom County Parks and Recreation bought the homestead from Otis for $60,000. He kept living in the house while the county repaired and renovated it, moving out in 1971 when the park opened to the public; he died in 1979. What makes the place work as a museum is that it...

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Image: Truth Is King 24 | CC BY-SA 4.0