History

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

A mile offshore of Tillamook Head in the very northwest corner of Oregon, between Seaside and Cannon Beach, squats the 100-foot-high basalt monolith called Tillamook Rock. Back in the days of …

Scott Rekate remembers a lot about visiting the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse. It was dark. Even a little spooky.

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

ILWACO — Winter weather brings winter storms and the winter storms of the past brought many ships to ground along the coast of the Long Beach Peninsula. The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum — …

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

Several years ago, as Columbia-Pacific Heritage Museum Curator Barbara Minard and I were talking about the many losses of small fishing boats in those days before motors, she stated, with emph…

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

As the uproar continued about the need to try to control the mouth of the Columbia River — “When are we going to get a jetty?!” — the turmoil was periodically punctuated by yet another wreck. …

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

Those of us who enjoy Joanne Rideout’s “Ship Report” on KMUN radio know that wheat is one of the most frequent cargoes filling those freighters we watch sailing outbound. That’s been the case …

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

ILWACO — The economy in Pacific County and the rest of America nearly came to a dead stop at the beginning of the Great Depression, as banks failed and money dried up.

Editor’s Note: In this series, local historian Sydney Stevens examines the many connections among Pacific County residents — connections with one another and with the past; connections that bi…

The ship was the Abercorn, bound from England for Portland, Oregon, full of iron rails for a regional railroad. Only a few years old, Glasgow-built of iron, she was a solid vessel, and not sma…

The Beeswax shipwreck, a local mystery born from blocks of beeswax and shards of Chinese porcelain found along the shores of the Nehalem Spit, is the subject of the Oregon Historical Society’s…

Building a four and a half mile-long spine of rocks out into the ocean, so as to direct the River’s outflow and keep sand from piling up in the Columbia Bar, thereby messing up the shipping ch…

Beginning in 1869 with the vessel Helen Angier and the first direct shipment of wheat from Portland to Liverpool, the “wheat fleet” — many ships over many years — began to materialize off the …

When I came to the North Coast, I worked for a time at a bookstore in Long Beach which sold a lot of Jim Gibbs’ book “Pacific Graveyard,” his classic tales of shipwrecks in our nearby waters. …

One of the enjoyable things about reading The Astorian from the 1880s is seeing what was considered news and what we researchers can figure out about the events of the day.

RAYMOND — The Northwest Carriage Museum recently marked the arrival of its 51st horse-drawn vehicle, a road grader dating from the 1890s.

By the second half of the 19th century in the Oregon country, most business was well established up-river in Portland. Astoria had lost its late, brief battle to supplant the inland city as th…

The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s Great Republic was a huge side-wheel masterpiece built on Long Island, New York, in 1866. At the time, she was the largest wooden steamship “ever built in …

From its inauguration, Astoria’s first newspaper, the Tri-Weekly Astorian, itemized the ship traffic coming and going in the Columbia. In August 1873, it reported:

ILWACO — The 1960s were a decade of change on the Long Beach Peninsula. In 1961, the loss of the fishing vessel Mermaid and the motor lifeboat Triumph became the impetus for the founding of th…

New York-born Joel W. Munson came west in 1853, first to Portland where he got work as a carpenter helping to build a lumber mill down the Columbia River. He next moved to Astoria for several …

Three-quarters of the way through the 1850s, the entrance and exit of the noted entrance to the West’s great river was assisted by bar pilots, buoys, and a lighthouse. Three months after Cape …

Journalists who traveled out west wrote stories that found their way to newspapers back home. One piece in The New York Tribune of August 1855 featured observations about our part of the world:

After sunrise on July 18, 1860, the sky west of the mouth of the Columbia turned back to night, as if a cavern was opening between this and a darker world. Soon, all around, there was an “unea…

LONG BEACH — There once were dozens of salmon canneries from Hammond to Clifton and Ilwaco to Eagle Cliff. They were key to the Columbia estuary’s early economy and settlement.

LONG BEACH — There once were dozens of salmon canneries from Hammond to Clifton and Ilwaco to Eagle Cliff. They were key to the Columbia estuary’s early economy and settlement.

About the time Congress was reading Lt. Howison’s recommendations of 1848 — those calling for a lighthouse, lighted and unlighted buoys, bar pilots, and a steam towing tug (read: non-wind-powe…

Seaview founder Jonathan Stout remembered with new headstone

Newspapers were reporting that some were getting rich in California and maybe other places out West; readers who wanted to get out of bonded servitude, debt, or to “start over” were eager to k…

In those days before telegraph, radio, telephone, television and internet, newspapers were the way of getting the news around. (Other options were hand-written letters between correspondents, …

When the U.S. entered World War I a century ago this month, local news was dominated by — what else? — the spring salmon season.

One day in February 1842 readers of the Baltimore (Maryland) Sun opened their paper to read of a shipwreck in the Columbia River, away on that far coast of the newly-expanded United States. It…

The American fur-trading experiment known as Fort Astoria had a brief life. One expression of the War of 1812 between the U.S. and Great Britain was Canada’s North West Company buying out the …