The Oregon Electric Railroad

The following story is courtesy of Finn J.D. John - Offbeat Oregon

The Oregon Electric railroad line: State's past, and future?

The plush rail service left artifacts along its lines after being made obsolete by the popularity of automobiles.

The  Pirtle transfer station on the Oregon Electric Railroad line just south
of Albany is now derelict and covered with graffiti. Note the "O" and "E" in
the upper corners. (Finn J.D. John)

By Finn J.D. John — March 22, 2009

Downloadable audio file (MP3, 96 Kbps)

About two miles south of Albany city limits, at the edge of a field dotted with grazing sheep, is a derelict building in a stand of trees beside a lonely stretch of railroad track.

It's tall, square and classical-looking. In fact, it looks like the shell of something that was once very impressive. And it's about 200 yards from the nearest road -- a tiny rural lane that sees perhaps two cars an hour at most.

This is Pirtle Station, a transfer station on the Oregon Electric Railroad line that once connected Portland to Eugene.

The Oregon Electric was launched in 1907 as a short passenger line running from Portland to Salem. Five years later, the line was extended with great fanfare to Eugene.Electric railroads were taking the country by storm at the time.

While a steam train had to include a heavy, expensive locomotive pulling a long string of cars to be cost -effective, an electric could consist of one car, with an electric motor between its wheels. The only trouble was, you couldn't send the power more than a hundred miles or so, or the voltage would bleed off. So using electricity only really worked on short, local lines between cities.

This video was made by Charles Turner at www.darewehope.org during
a haircut at the shop of Ivan "The Hairable" Tadic, a Portland history buff
with a particular interest in the Oregon Electric line. Tadic remembers the
line when it was operating, in the 1930s.

On the Oregon Electric, the coaches were plush and comfortable, the service fast and dependable -- and, powered entirely by electricity, cheap and easy to maintain. The future looked bright for the new rail line.
Of course, it wasn't. The same year it was launched, Henry Ford created the automotive assembly-line system that would result in thousands of inexpensive Ford Model Ts crawling all over Oregon within a decade. The better cars became, the fewer people chose to ride the rails. By the time World War II ended every passenger electric railroad in Oregon, from the Oregon Electric to the streetcars in Portland, had died for lack of business.

The Oregon Electric itself shut down electric operations in 1945, but by then it was exclusively hauling freight. It went from making almost $1 million in 1920 to $17,313 in 1932. The following year, when the Public Utility Commission held a hearing to end passenger service on the line, only six people came.
But you can still see plenty of evidence of what it was like, all along the line.

Of course, in Eugene there is the Oregon Electric Station restaurant. This famous eatery occupies the station built there after the line came to Eugene in 1912; it's a Georgian Revival building with a very distinctive triple-arch facade, and there are a couple of the old coaches outfitted as dining areas. It's been lovingly restored to its original glory.

In Albany, the station -- only slightly less fancy -- is now home to Ciddicci's Pizza, a place with deep roots in the community, at which one can pore over pages from old Albany high-school yearbooks varnished over on the tabletops.

But the indirect effects of the Oregon Electric line are much more pervasive today. This cheap, fast service from Portland made the south Willamette Valley accessible to thousands of people who otherwise wouldn't have come. It's no accident that the towns it went through became some of the biggest in the valley.

Ironically enough, all commercial railroads are electric today. The difference is, the electricity is no longer sent over wires to the trains; the power is generated in the engines by massive diesel generators.

(Sources: Johnson, Emory R. Elements of Transportation. New York: Appleton, 1909; Culp, Edwin D. Stations West: The Story of Oregon Railroads. Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1972; www.oes-restaurant.com; www.pdxhistory.com)

 

Local Oregon Boy Saves Millions Of Lives

The following story is courtesy of Finn J.D. John - Offbeat Oregon

Local boy saves millions from starving, becomes president

Few people know it, but the most hated president of the 20th Century saved more people from starving to death than anyone else in the history of the world — ever.

Herbert C. Hoover in the mid-1890s, shortly after
he graduated from Stanford University. Many
Oregon residents would have recognized "Bert" in
this picture. Photo is from the Herbert Hoover
Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. (For a
larger image, click here.)

By Finn J.D. John — May 3, 2009

Downloadable audio file (MP3, 96 Kbps)

In the early days of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was the guy everybody loved to hate. The country was spiralling into a worsening economic disaster, and all he could seem to do was mumble about "confidence."
As is the case with most such moments in history, there was a substantial amount of unfairness in this. But lately, with the country on uncertain economic grounds, his name has been coming up more and more often.
The thing is, there are several things most people don't know about Hoover. The first is that he actually grew up in the Willamette Valley.
The second is that he is personally responsible for saving hundreds of millions of people from starving to death. The man holds the world record. In fact, he prevented somewhere between two and five times more deaths than Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot caused — together.

An orphan in a strange land

Hoover's Oregon years started in 1885, when he was 11 and a freshly bereaved orphan. Both his father and his mother died before they were 40. His uncle, John Minthorn of Newberg, offered to take him in, and so his relatives bundled him aboard a westbound train and sent him to the Beaver State.
The future president was part of a strict Quaker community. As such, as his biography from the Hoover Museum puts it, he was "put to school and the chores." He milked the cow, split wood and cared for a team of ponies on the Minthorn farm, while getting educated at Friends Pacific Academy — which still exists, although it's a college now: George Fox University.
When his uncle moved from Newberg to Salem and started the Oregon Land Company, young Bert came with him, and served as an office assistant there. His signature can still be seen on the title deed to the Boston Mill, a historic gristmill on the Calapooia River near Shedd, which is now a state park.
Hoover's time as an Oregonian came to an end after just six years, when he moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to become a member of the first class ever to graduate from Stanford University, where he met his future wife, geology student Lou Henry. He never moved back to Oregon; instead, he launched a career as a mining engineer, which took him all over the world. In the early 1900s, he and his family actually circled the world five times — this, of course, in a time when the best vehicle on offer was a steamship.

Saving the children of Belgium

During World War I, Hoover engineered, launched and led a program to get food to the starving people of occupied Belgium while keeping it out of the hands of the German soldiers — if the Germans got hold of it, the British Navy would cut off his access and the people would starve. Faced with an alarming increase in glandular tuberculosis brought on by malnutrition, his Committee for Relief in Belgium actually invented a special cookie to feed the children there, to get them proper nutrition in the most efficient way possible. This cookie was made with "gray" wartime flour, cocoa powder and a little bit of lard; to a well-fed Belgian child today, it would taste like lacquered cardboard, but to that child's great-grandmother in 1917, it was heavenly.

Feeding 300 million people

After the U.S. entered the war, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson appointed Republican Hoover as the U.S.'s food administrator, and after the war tapped him to figure out how to feed the starving people of the rest of war-ravaged Europe. The American Relief Administration quickly became the primary source of food for 300 million people in Europe.
How many of those people would have starved without Hoover's expertise? How many Belgian children would have wasted away and died without his cookies? The number cannot possibly be less than 200 million souls. It's probably much more than that. In his memoirs, Hoover himself put the number at 1.4 billion, which, although certainly on the high side, may actually be accurate; he was including lives saved in the wake of World War II as well.

An ironic legacy

On a roster of world leaders who have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for thousands or even millions of deaths, it's ironic that one of the U.S. presidents to whom history has been the harshest actually saved millions and millions of innocent people from a miserable and agonizing death.
Hoover may not have handled the Depression as well as he could have. But after learning the whole story of his life, it's hard to be hard on him for that. And it's interesting to consider something else: Would Hoover have learned what he needed to know if he had not grown up in Newberg, not gone to George Fox and Stanford — if he had stayed in Iowa at his father's blacksmith shop?
Maybe not.
His stony, uncaring reputation to the contrary, Herbert Hoover is a former Oregonian our state can be proud to claim.

Personal note:

I initially wrote this column after I had just discovered the untold Herbert Hoover story. I posted it to the Internet and forgot about it until 2012. The original contained a couple factual errors, introduced by the source I was working with; in the years since then, I've found an awful lot of source materials about Hoover are factually inaccurate. Put simply, the man was a powerful political symbol, and historical coverage tends to be informed largely by whether the author approves or disapproves of what Hoover has come to represent — which, ironically, is something considerably different from what he actually endorsed.
If your interest has been piqued and you'd like to find out more, I can enthusiastically recommend Martin Fausold, David Hinshaw and Lee Nash. Hoover's own memoirs are also surprisingly fun to read, although not always entirely accurate. If you're up for a more scholarly treatment, Joan Hoff Wilson and George Nash are excellent. Should you run across William Leuchtenburg's slim 2009 biographical sketch — can I just tell you that I hate it? It's overtly and shamelessly hostile, is sketchily and unprofessionally sourced, and reads like a political hit piece. I have trouble believing a legitimate scholar is responsible for it, because it is really not a work of scholarship, although it purports to be one. Along the same lines, I suggest not bothering with any of the dozens of "Presidential Series" books which you'll find in the usual places in middle-school libraries and places like that. You'll find in them the opposite problem from that posed by Leuchtenburg — that is, most are fawning and uncritical, and pass on disputed anecdotes as proven facts.
Finally, I should mention that I am now working on my second book, and it's about Hoover's operations in Belgium. I probably will hold off publishing it, though, until 2014, in the 100-year anniversary year of the outbreak of the First World War.

(Sources: Hoover Presidential Library and Museum at http://hoover.archives.gov; Hoover, Herbert. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1920. New York: MacMillan, 1951; Nash, George. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917. New York: Norton, 1984)

Click here to read more of Finn J.D. John's "Offbeat Oregon History."

There's Still Gold In Them Thar' Hills!

The following story is courtesy of Finn J.D. John - Offbeat Oregon

Is legendary Blue Bucket Mine still out there in Oregon mountains?

A group of kids from a lost wagon train found some strange yellow rocks in 1845, three years before the Gold Rush hit. Miners have been looking for the kids' play spot ever since.

By Finn J.D. John — April 19, 2009

Downloadable audio file (MP3, 96 Kbps)

Somewhere in the mountains of northeast Oregon, a huge deposit of gold is still sitting quietly, waiting to be discovered — or so they say.
It’s known as the “Lost Blue Bucket Mine.”
Here’s the story:

Lost and hungry in the Blue Mountains

In 1845, Stephen Meek, the brother of Oregon legend Joe Meek, convinced a bunch of Oregon Trail pioneers in Idaho that he could guide them across the Cascades without going through the dangerous rapids on the Columbia — that he could show them a “cut-off” that would take them straight across the beltline of Oregon to the Willamette Valley. They set out in high spirits, but after a month or two wandering across the High Desert they realized Meek had no idea where he was going or what he was doing. He escaped before they could lynch him, but by then, of course, they were committed and had to work their way through as best they could.
A group of them was camped by a stream or river one night, trying to find its way and trying not to starve. Meanwhile, some of the kids were playing by the river. It was autumn, so stream flows would have been low. One of the kids found an interesting yellow pebble, strangely heavy.

Funny yellow pebbles

They discovered that the river was full of these yellow pebbles — they could be removed from the riverbed with a shovel, they were so deep and plentiful. The kids filled up a blue bucket with them and brought them back to camp, where the adults puzzled over what they might be. The party’s blacksmith put one on a metal wagon tire and pounded on it; it flattened easily.
Well, of course, you know what it was. And you might think they should have known, too. But you have to remember, this was in 1845. Until 1849, virtually nobody knew the West had any gold in it at all. The idea that they were looking at a fortune in precious metal never crossed their minds.
But they did find that the strange rocks made great sinkers for fishing — the current in the river was too fast for their lines without a sinker. That night everyone in the party had a big fish dinner — the best food they’d had for a long time.
Then they moved on. “No,” the grown-ups told the kids, “you may not bring a bunch of rocks with you. The poor starving oxen have too much weight to pull as it is.”
So the “rocks” stayed behind.

Then gold was discovered

Well, as you can imagine, four years later when gold was discovered in California, those emigrants — now farming land claims in the Willamette Valley — realized what they’d found. But they had no idea where it was.
No one has ever re-discovered that spot. Many have tried — in fact, prospectors looking for it found dozens of other lucrative mines in the Blue Mountains — but the Blue Bucket Mine remains undiscovered to this day.

The Auburn swindle

As a side note, one man actually made his fortune pretending he knew where it was.This fellow’s name was J.L. Adams. He started bragging around Portland in 1861 that he’d found the mine and needed some folks to help him work it. Quickly he put together a party of 58 men and off they went. Problem was, it quickly became obvious that he wasn’t leading them anywhere in particular. Finally, faced with a hangman’s noose, he confessed: He’d wanted to prospect in the Blue Mountains with a large enough party to fend off any hostile Native Americans, and had made up the whole story as a recruiting scheme.
The volunteers decided not to kill him. Instead, they took everything but his clothes and kicked him out of camp and started for home.
On the way, they hit gold. Lots of it. Not the Blue Bucket Mine, but a big enough strike for everyone to stake a lucrative claim – even Adams, who had been following the party scavenging food from camp leftovers.
The strike became a town, and the town became Auburn.
The town of Blue Bucket has yet to be platted. Is it still out there, somewhere in the mountains of northeast Oregon, waiting for a weekend adventurer, elk hunter or fly fisherman to stumble upon? Have subsequent floodwaters covered all the yellow pebbles with silt yards deep? Or did some crazy lonely prospector find it, mine it secretly and disappear?
We’ll probably never know.

How much truth is in this story?

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this frontier Oregon legend; there are aspects of the Blue Bucket story that make it clear it's been at the very least augmented over the years.
First, if the nuggets made such great fishing sinkers, and the settlers were so hungry, would they not have brought a few as fishing tackle?
Secondly, why are there no names associated with this story? Sure, the people involved could have tried to keep quiet about it, hoping to go back and cash in; but there were two or three years in which they supposedly had no idea what they'd found, and their unusually difficult Oregon Trail experience would have been a frequent topic of conversation during that time. How is it that we don't know who they were?
Third, in an era in which people sometimes had to bite coins to make sure they weren't fakes, how likely is it that a blacksmith would not recognize the nuggets as gold, even after learning how soft they were by beating one on the wagon tire?
Then, too, the idea that none of the children of the wagon train would have snuck a rock or two into a pocket seems pretty unlikely.
There's probably something real in this story somewhere; a legend like this seldom springs from nothing. Still, though, it's been 170 years. Who knows what the real story is?
The one thing we do know is that generations of Oregonians have shared and appreciated and wondered about this story around campfires and over dinner tables throughout the years. And we know, too, that people looking for it have made history — and would not have done so had it not been for this bit of frontier folklore.
As a historical account, it's pretty sketchy. But as a piece of oral folklore, this story's place in state history is assured and well deserved.
(Sources: Friedman, Ralph. Tales Out of Oregon. Sausalito, CA: Pars Publishing, 1967; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene: Navillus, 2006)

 

The Last Old West Train Robbery - Siskiyou Summit

Photo courtesy of http://www.livinggoldpress.com/SummitHotTopic.htm.

The following story is courtesy of Finn J.D. John - Offbeat Oregon

13 was unlucky number for train passengers, robbers alike

D'Autremont brothers destroyed mail car, killed several people in bungled attempt at a heist in 1923, in American history's last Old West-style train robbery.

By Finn J.D. John — April 5, 2009

One of the most dramatic events in Oregon state history took place on Oct. 11, 1923, in a railroad tunnel in southern Oregon.

It almost sounds like a Hollywood movie script. The train was the “No. 13 Gold Special,” heading from Seattle to San Francisco. In command was engineer Sidney Bates – and it was to be his last run; he was ready to retire and start drawing a nice pension. And at the fateful hour, the train was just cresting the Siskiyou summit and testing its brakes, getting ready to go through Tunnel 13.

When the train slowed down to test the brakes, three men jumped aboard. This was the d’Autremont brothers: 23-year-old twins Ray and Roy and their teenage brother, Hugh. They’d been planning a train robbery for months, and they’d heard a rumor that $500,000 worth of gold was aboard, so Train 13 seemed like a good one to hit. They’d stolen some dynamite from a construction site and, of course, they were armed with pistols. These, they pointed at Bates and ordered him to stop.

Bates stopped the train at the end of Tunnel 13. Back in the train, the passengers were not pleased – coal smoke was starting to leak into the cars. Up front, the brothers weren’t happy either. The mail clerk, who was actually covering someone else’s shift, barricaded himself inside the car, so the brothers packed their dynamite around the car and touched it off.

Unfortunately for everyone, they had no idea what they were doing, and the amount of dynamite they used utterly destroyed the car and killed the clerk instantly.

Meanwhile, passengers and crew members were trying to fight their way through the smoke and fire to the south end of the tunnel, but it was too intense. Finally, a brakeman, Coyle Johnson, managed to fight his way through – and was promptly gunned down by the robbers.

Likely realizing time was running out and there was no sign of money or gold, the brothers decided to get away while they could. So, they killed engineer Bates and the fireman, Marvin Seng, the only witnesses who had seen them; then they dipped their feet in creosote to throw the bloodhounds off the scent and fled.

They might have gotten away with the crime, except for Edward O. Heinrich, a detective brought in to work on the crime. Heinrich, looking over a pair of overalls left by the bandits, deduced from pitch stains on the garments that the wearer was likely a lumberjack, and from the wear patterns on the buttons, that he was left-handed. But the most damning thing he found was a crumpled-up old mail receipt in one of the pockets. He was able to track this right back to the brothers.

Ten days after the crime, Ray felt enough time had passed that he might hop a freight train to Ashland to do some shopping. Once he got there, he opened a newspaper over a cup of coffee in a diner – and saw his name in a headline. 

Of course, he raced right back to the hideout to tell the others the beans had been spilled. The brothers left the area, assumed new identities and started new lives – but four years later, the past caught up with them when Hugh, who had joined the Army, was fingerprinted.

All three drew life sentences. Hugh was paroled in 1959 and died a few months later; Roy, who’d been given a lobotomy in prison, also died just a few months after his parole in 1983. Ray, paroled in 1961, died in 1984, and spent many years working as a part-time janitor at the University of Oregon.

(Sources: Joers, Lawrence E.C. “The Siskiyou Train Robbery,” Great Moments in Oregon History. Portland: New Oregon Publishers, 1987 – a 6-page account by a physician who was aboard the train; http://ftp.wi.net/~maracon/lesson6.html; http://tunnel13.com; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene: Navillus, 2006)

A Honey of a Beeswax Story ...

 The following post comes courtesy of Finn J.D. John.

 

Coming to a beach near you: Ghostly beeswax from the 1600s

Chunks of beeswax that still occasionally wash up on Oregon beaches have been carbon-dated to the early 1600s, and are believed to be from a wrecked Spanish galleon.

 

By Finn J.D. John — March 18, 2009

 

By now, the wreck of the New Carissa — or, rather, the half of it that ended up on a beach near Coos Bay — is just about gone. And just in time, too – sorted, cleaned steel is once again barely worth the cost to salvage, but not long ago it was selling for more than a dime a pound on the scrap-metal market. And there was a lot of it on that beach — plenty enough to qualify, for a properly equipped salvage outfit, as treasure from a shipwreck.

But it certainly isn’t the first trove of shipwreck treasure to be found off the shores of Oregon, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, one of the most famous sunken treasure ships off the coast is also quite possibly the oldest — but we remember it well, because bits of it float up onto the shore to remind us even now, more than 400 years later, that it’s out there somewhere.

No one knows for sure what this wreck’s name is, or even what country it’s from. Most scientists and historians agree it’s most likely a Spanish ship. Specifically, they think it’s the galleon “San Francisco Xavier,” which left Manila in 1603. There was an outbreak of civil war there, and several high-ranking Spanish families used the galleon as a refuge from the violence, hoping to start a new life in California.
They never made it. They and their ship vanished without a trace.

Frank J. Kumm, custodian of Pioneer Museum of Tillamook, holds a piece of beeswax found on the nearby beach in 1952. In 1961, radiocarbon dating showed the wax was formed in the 1600s. Historians think it was part of the cargo of a Spanish ship wrecked nearby between 1650 and 1675. (Salem Public Library/Ben Maxwell)

Was it, along with its cargo of prized Asian beeswax and all those wealthy families’ personal treasure, lost near the mouth of the Nehalem River in Oregon? Quite possibly. Or it could have come from another ship. The Spanish greatly preferred beeswax from the east — it had a higher melting point and slower burn rate than the stuff European bees produced, and that was important for the many candles used in the Catholic Mass, which in turn was important to the missions of California. So they loaded and shipped the stuff by the ton, on ship after ship, from India to the missions of California throughout the 1600s and 1700s.

Might one or more of those ships have been blown off course and foundered near Tillamook? Accounts by natives — including one who, interviewed in 1895 at the age of 100 years, said his father had witnessed the wreck of a galleon near the Nehalem — support this theory.

What we do know is, for the last 400 years, chunks of beeswax have been washing up on the Oregon coast. The further north, the more is found, although one big chunk was found recently as far south as Gold Beach. Radiocarbon dating shows these pieces of wax, and the bits of wood embedded in them, are about as old as the San Francisco Xavier.

And somewhere, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean not far from the place where Tillamook Cheese is made, there is a 400-year-old wreck that is probably Spanish — and quite possibly full of gold and jewelry.

Sources: The Beeswax Wreck Project Website (Naga Research Group, Hawaii); NW Limited Magazine; Gulick, Bill. A Roadside History of Oregon. Missoula: Mountain Press, 1991.

Sawmill Town of Valsetz, Oregon

  Here is another terrific post authored by  Finn J.D. John that appeared on Offbeat Oregon History, March 7, 2009.


The following post caught my eye, because it hits very close to home.  In the 1940's there were more than two dozen sawmills operating in the Illinois Valley, and now Rough and Ready Lumber Co. is the only one left in Josephine County!

_______________________________________________

Company town of Valsetz was soggy, but home

The tiny town was owned by the sawmill, which bulldozed and burned it in 1984 when the mill closed.

By Finn J.D. John — March 7, 2009

How much does it rain where you live? Western Oregon has a reputation for being very soggy. Most of the state's western population centers — Portland, Salem, Eugene — get 30 to 40 inches of water each year.
Now imagine getting 120.
There was a town in Western Oregon that got an average of 10 feet of rainfall a year. This was actually more than any other town in the country, anywhere.
Except, it wasn't really a town. And it no longer exists.
It was called Valsetz, and it was essentially a mill camp: A couple hundred little houses built on timber company land by a sawmill at which almost everyone in town worked. It was in a little saddle in the middle of the Coast Range, about halfway between Monmouth and the Pacific Ocean.

Birth of a company town

The story of Valsetz is the story of the timber industry in Oregon, or most of it anyway. The place was founded in 1919 by the local timber company that built the mill. At its peak in the 1940s and '50s, more than 1,500 people lived there — in the middle of the Coast Range, 15 muddy miles of gravel road from "civilization" in Falls City. It had its own school district, a company store, and a two-lane bowling alley that looked, from the inside, like a railroad tunnel.
Crime was virtually nonexistent because the town was so isolated. The town had no police force. It was all private property, so some laws just didn't apply; kids zipped around on motorcycles long before they turned 16.

A sportsman's paradise

Valsetz also had its own herd of elk, a lake with more fish than the residents could ever eat, and wild woods everywhere just outside of town. Valsetz was a sportsman's paradise.
It wasn't a timber company's paradise, though. Not in the early 1980s. The timber industry was getting squeezed hard. The building boom of the 1970s had given way to "stagflation" and recession. Nobody was buying wood. Advances in automation were making it possible to run a mill with a lot fewer workers anyway. Good first-growth trees were getting hard to find, and the Valsetz mill had been converted to a plywood operation.
It made no sense at all to run a plywood mill — where second-growth "dog hair" logs are peeled to cores and glued together — smack in the middle of the best tree-growing climate on the West Coast. Federal forests were virtually shut down to further logging, either for legal reasons or because they’d already been cut over. Boise-Cascade, Weyerhaeuser and Willamette Industries knew if they were going to survive, it would be on the trees they grew on their own lands. And for Boise-Cascade, Valsetz occupied many acres of the very best of those lands.

The end comes

So as other loggers and millworkers around the state were trying to find a new job, the people of Valsetz were put on notice that they'd need to find a new home, too. 
This was harsh. While other timber workers had at least the equity in their homes to fall back on, Valsetz residents had six months to clear out — with nothing. "Now I know how boat people feel," one of them said at the time.
Many salvage companies tried to work out a deal with Boise-Cascade. But the company wanted the town gone right away, so the land it sat on could get to work producing logs for other Boise-Cascade mills.
In just a few months, the entire town was bulldozed, dragged into a giant pile of rubble and put to the torch.
Today the only sign of the town you'll see is a stand of young trees by the side of a dirt road — and the memorial Web sites former residents maintain to their vanished home town.
(Sources: Corvallis Gazette-Times, Feb. 25, 1984; Sacramento Bee, March 18, 1984; www.valsetz.homestead.com)

Bayocean: The Oregon Town That Was Swallowed By the Pacific

I found a terrific post authored by  Finn J.D. John that appeared on Offbeat Oregon History, February 25, 2009.

After you've finished reading it, and if you're curious and like to hike, there are two wonderful hikes you can take at what was once Bayocean.  You can take the easier four mile hike, or if you want a real workout you can opt for the eight mile hike.  

You should spot many different birds on either of these hikes, and what I like best about them is that they are both loop trails. 

It feels a little eerie at Bayocean, a ghost town where even the buildings are only shadows!  It's a lonely hike; in all the times my husband and I have gone there, we never ran into any living people.

_______________________________________________

Bayocean: The town that paid for its own doom

Town paid to build jetty that changed the ocean's currents, washed it away; the town slid into the sea, house by house.

By Finn J.D. John — February 25, 2009

Between Tillamook Bay and the sea there’s a narrow, sandy peninsula where, 100 years ago, a town stood. Not just any town – one of the biggest ones on the Oregon Coast. With a municipal swimming hall full of warm saltwater and a surf generator.

The reason it’s gone today? Because the residents paid to build a jetty to make their steamship journey smoother. The jetty changed the ocean currents, and the ocean washed the town away. The residents had paid for their own destruction.

Bayocean got its start in 1906 when a real estate developer named T.B. Potter got hold of it and platted the town. Potter thought big. Over the next few years, he sold off 1,600 lots and built a large hotel, a dance hall and that swimming hall – a mammoth structure right by the beach, so residents could choose between cold surf and warm.

Potter thought big, but his actual execution was more of a mid-size. He promptly installed a telephone network in Bayocean, which worked great for local calls across town – but wasn’t linked to the outside world. Getting fresh water was a hassle, too; Potter built a pipeline, but didn’t put a booster pump on it, so the water pressure was actually so low that sometimes water would not reach some of the lots. He also installed streets made of concrete rather than dirt or sand, but it didn’t matter much; no road was built to the “mainland” until the 1920s, so most residents didn’t bother with cars. Most folks arrived on Potter’s steamship, the S.S. Bayocean, which made a three-day journey from the town to Portland and a three-day trip back, once a week.

The steamer trip was a terrifying ordeal sometimes, though. Of course, it would have to cross the Columbia River bar up at Astoria – the bar’s dangers are still legendary – and thread the needle into the unprotected mouth of Tillamook Bay. This last could be more scary than the bar crossing, which at least could be kept reasonably smooth by not crossing when the tide was coming in.

Residents started clamoring for a protective jetty. The Army Corps of Engineers studied the place and told them they needed two jetties, one on each side of the mouth of the bay, and it would cost $2.2 million – half of which would have to come from local residents.

The residents couldn’t afford to do that, so they proposed a single jetty. A little over $800,000 later, it was done, and Bayocean’s soon-to-be-ex-homeowners paid half.

Each household had ponied up roughly $450 – which, in 1917, was enough to buy one and a half brand-new Ford Model Ts.  And for a while, things were great. The steamship ride was much more pleasant without coming across the open ocean.

But then something odd started happening. Bayocean’s broad sandy beach started getting a little less broad. Then it started getting a lot less broad.

Finally, in 1932, waves from a massive storm crossed the beach and destroyed the massive seaside swimming hall.

From there, it got worse and worse. The hotel started falling, room by room, into the sea. Each winter, the sea got further in. By 1938, 59 homes were gone.

Finally, in the early 1950s, the sea breached the spit and rushed into Tillamook Bay, turning Bayocean into an island. Instantly, a multi-million-dollar oyster fishery was ruined, a thousand acres of oyster beds buried in sand. Salinity in the bay surged. The estuary’s fisheries started to collapse.

The government sprang into action, building a riprap seawall across the gap to keep the sea out. Some time after that, in the early 1970s, the second jetty was added; it solved the problem with the currents, and the sand started building itself back up on the spit.

But it was too late for Bayocean. By then, the entire town was gone.

(Sources: Webber, Bert & al. Bayocean: The Oregon Town that Fell into the Sea. Central Point, OR: Webb Research Group, 1989; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene, OR: Navillus, 2006)

A view from the hotel that once existed in Bayocean.

The dance hall (foreground) and natatorium once located in Bayocean.

Grafitti Found in the Oregon Caves

The following post was authored by Finn J.D. John, and appeared on Offbeat Oregon History, November 8, 2008.

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A pioneer scientist's autograph set in stone, deep in the Oregon Caves

Prof. Thomas Condon and his students signed a stalagmite in Oregon Caves in 1883; their autographs are now protected by a thin layer of translucent calcite and will remain legible for millennia.

By Finn J.D. John — November 8, 2008

This travel blog photo's source is TravelPod page: Exploring marble caves

The signatures of Prof. Thomas Condon and his students, put there in
pencil in 1883, are still visible beneath a protective coating of calcite in
the Oregon Caves.

Deep underground in southwestern Oregon, there are a series of autographs dating back 125 years that are actually part of Oregon’s geology.
Fittingly enough, the autographs are those of the state’s most famous pioneer geologist and a group of his students.

A building's namesake

If you’ve spent any time on the University of Oregon campus, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Condon Hall. It’s a big, dignified-looking building that went up on campus in 1925 to house the science department; today, it’s home to the anthropology department.

Born in Ireland

The building’s namesake, Thomas Condon, was born in 1822 in County Cork, Ireland. His family emigrated to America, and he came to Oregon on a clipper ship from New York as a missionary in 1852. In 1872, he became Oregon’s first state geologist while teaching at Pacific University in Forest Grove, and in 1876 was appointed the U of O’s first professor of geology, in the year that college was founded. He was there until he died, in 1907.

Touring the newly discovered caves

What we’re interested in today, though, is 1883. That’s the year Condon and one of his classes traveled to southern Oregon to look at the newly discovered Oregon Caves.

Condon and his students toured the caves – which are still one of the state’s top geological wonders. While they were there, they took a pencil and actually autographed one of the translucent cream-colored calcite stalagmites in one of the passages.

Autographing the stone

Today, of course, this would be considered an outrage, and would likely be paid for with the professor’s position, tenured or no. But in 1883, things were quite different. First, no one yet knew that those stalagmites had built up through the steady dripping of calcium-laden water over millions of years. People were actually chipping them off and taking them home as souvenirs. Condon and his students, most likely, were among them. In fact, many people thought the stalagmites were built up over a period of years measured in the hundreds or even dozens, not millions.
It would be decades before scientists realized that the Oregon Caves were a geologic treasure and should be protected. It would be a half century or more before someone realized that, wonderful as Professor Condon was, his class’s signatures didn’t belong on that stalagmite. Someone took a Pink Pearl down there – or some other device or chemical designed to remove pencil marks – and set to work removing the signatures from the stalagmite.

Marks can't be erased

They would not come off. In the intervening years, millions of gallons of water falling drip by drip on the stalagmite had covered the pencil marks with a thin veneer of calcite. Translucent, the calcite allowed the pencil marks to be seen perfectly. Scientists realized they would have to destroy the stalagmite in order to save it from Prof. Condon’s early version of “Kilroy Was Here.”
Today, if you take an Oregon State Parks tour of the caves, the guide will point out the signatures. The personal markings of these genteel and unwitting vandals are sealed there for all time. It’s interesting to look at them and realize they will be there, clearly visible, for several hundred thousand years before the calcite over them becomes too thick to read through, an artifact of early state history. The archaeologists of some future civilization may, thousands of generations hence, find themselves puzzling over the cryptic marks made in graphite on that stalagmite and covered over with a few millimeters of calcite by Thomas Condon.
Fitting, isn’t it, that the archaeology department is now in the hall named after him?

(Sources: Bishop, Ellen & al. Hiking Oregon’s Geology. Portland: Mountaineers, 2004; tour of Oregon Caves, Cave Junction, OR, August 2007; www.nps.gov)

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The Italian word "grafitti" came into use between 1850 and 1855.  It is the plural of "grafitto."