Henrietta Haller
"We are not concerned with the Indians about our children.I keep them close to the house because of the snakes."
— Henrietta Haller
The Haller House may have been an Army officer’s home, but it was run by women and teeming with children.
Born in Ireland around 1824, Henrietta Cox Haller was a woman of spirit - fit to manage a family on-the-fly around two continents. In 1852 she departed New York with her husband and the 4th Infantry on a 7 month voyage around Cape Horn to Fort Dalles on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. With her were her two-year-old daughter and ten-day-old son. By the time they arrived, she was expecting their third child.
On the prairie fort east of the Cascades, on a Whidbey Island farm on Crescent Harbor and in a stately house in Coupeville, Henrietta raised her brood with affection and fortitude. Her love of flowers and her beautiful gardens were remembered long after the family moved to Seattle in 1879.
Fort Henrietta in Echo, OR was built in 1855 and named after Mrs. Haller after she loaned a wagon to the poorly supplied militia.
Emma Coots
Emma was a hired servant in the Haller Household, and is one of countless unknown founding mothers of the Washington Territory. Daughter of an unknown native woman and Whatcom’s sheriff Charles Coots, Emma’s story is hard to trace, but she is representative of the countless mixed race marriages in the early settlement of the Northwest.
Nellie Moore Coupe
In 1863 then-Major Haller offered to send his niece, Nellie Moore, to an elite academy in Baltimore if she would come to Washington to educate his children
Nellie was so adept at education that families on the mainland boarded their children in Coupeville to keep a seat in her classroom. Here they could learn not only the basics but Latin, botany, geology, music and painting as well. She married the son and namesake of Captain Thomas Coupe, and was a lifelong teacher, becoming the first superintendent of Whatcom County Schools in 1883.
Henrietta, Nellie and Emma would have had their hands full with running the household, Nellie’s students and the Haller’s four children. The Haller’s four children knew the Haller House as their primary childhood home until 1879.