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Whale explodes: Details at 11.
The highway department guy didn't know how much dynamite to use, and said so on camera. But he still thinks the operation was a success. Check out the story of Florence's famous exploding whale ...
Far-out guru "enlightens" Central Oregon.
What happens when a colony of acolytes of an East Indian guru move in, then try to take over Wasco County? Check out the four-part story of the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram ...
this oregon youth went on to save half a billion lives...guess who?
A local Willamette Valley teen-ager named Bert Hoover, an orphan sent from Iowa to live with his uncle, went on to save millions of lives and become a singularly ill-starred U.S. president.
oregon's most spectacular shipwreck ever.
The steam schooner J. Marhoffer was almost brand-new when, burning fiercely from stem to stern, it piled onto the rocks near Depoe Bay. It's the remains of this fiery shipwreck that gave Boiler Bay its name ...
the gallant rescue of portland's floating brothel.
Maritime madam Nancy Boggs kept her bordello on a barge floating in the river, until a police raid cut it loose. But the captain and crew of a sternwheeler came to save the day. Here's the story.
take off to the province of oregon, eh?
Few people know how close Oregon came to officially becoming a British possession under the treaty that ended the War of 1812. Only the presence of a handful of scattered, starving survivors from Astor's fur enterprise prevented it. Here's how.
timberline lodge could have been a glass skyscraper
Calling the plan a "profit-making eyesore," a Forest Service manager nixed 1920s plan for a modern steel-and-glass structure with an aerial tramway. You can read about it right here.
pixieland: an edgy, vanished amusement park
Built in the late 1960s as a "fairy-tale history of Oregon," the amusement park lasted just a few years before slipping into receivership. Today, all that's left of this odd and uniquely Oregonian story is a dilapidated guardshack.
Lightship had to go cross-country to reach ocean again
Torn loose from its anchors in a storm, the Columbia River Lightship stranded high and dry on the beach near Seaside. Salvage companies labored mightily to refloat it, to no avail — until a house-moving contractor had an innovative idea.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A revised, updated and expanded version of this story was published in 2017 and is recommended in preference to this older one. To read it, click here.
The pastoral and tranquil beauty of this postcard image belies the
fearsome reputation of the mouth of the Columbia River; this area
receives the wildest weather in the state. The spot where the lightship
ran aground is about three-quarters of the way up the beach toward
the mouth of the river. For a larger image, click here.
By Finn J.D. John — Dec. 12, 2009
You’ve probably heard about the Columbia River bar. The river puts an enormous volume of fresh water out to sea, and when the tide is coming in, the seawater coming in fights with the river water going out in some spectacular ways — especially when there’s a storm.
And there’s often a storm. Some of the ugliest weather in the state happens right offshore there at Tillamook Head, where there are plenty of big ship-eating rocks.
Watery graveyard
After 1881, a lighthouse was stationed on the largest of these — “Terrible Tilly.” Its beacon lit up the sea with the burning of 170 gallons of kerosene every month — all of it lugged up the steps to the light in cans by the lighthouse staff.
Still, the ships kept sinking, so in 1892 the Coast Guard actually parked a “lightship,” a 123-foot floating lighthouse — an unusually stoutly built ship with no engine, equipped with three enormous anchors — in the entrance to the river. This was Lightship Columbia No. 50.
A bad assignment for the seasick
This helped a lot, although Coast Guard people dreaded being assigned to it. Certainly it was a bad deployment for anyone troubled by seasickness. A 123-foot ship sounds big and probably looks pretty vast in harbor, but anchored five miles west of the mouth of one of the world’s biggest rivers, on the edge of the world’s biggest ocean, it probably felt like a Chris-Craft.
Shipwrecked, kind of
One day in 1899, an unusually powerful storm snapped all three anchor cables and No. 50 was on its way. The crew scrambled to set sails — under the worst imaginable conditions — and managed to keep the ship offshore while a tow was arranged.
But the sea was too rough to do it. After several attempts, with the crew exhausted, No. 50 was intentionally beached near McKenzie Head, just south of the mouth of the river. Every member of the crew was rescued.
But what about the ship?
Most ships washed up on the Oregon Coast at this time were pounded to pieces by the surf. But the No. 50 had been built specifically to be pounded, and was showing no signs of breaking up.
How to get it off the beach?
When the weather improved, the Coast Guard started trying to tow it back out to sea. But the ocean had deposited beach sand around it, and it was going nowhere.
Fourteen months later, the Coast Guard gave up, declared it a salvage job and put it out for bids.
Enter the housemover
The winning bidder turned out to be a house-moving outfit out of Portland — Allan and Roberts Co. This intrepid contractor had an elegant and counter-intuitive plan. Instead of a frontal attack on the pounding surf, trying to shove the ship out to sea again, crews set it into a cradle on a specially built railway and — using a block and tackle — hauled it due east, away from the sea. Straight up the shore and into a forest, through which a path had been cleared.
The ship was making for the Columbia River. A formation in its banks named Baker’s Bay was just 700 yards from the beach where it was stranded. There, the ship could be peacefully pushed out into the water — without fighting the pounding surf. Then, all repairs made, it could wait tranquilly there, protected from the fury of the open sea, until the time was right to tow it back out into place once again.
Launched in the river
Which is exactly what happened. It cost $17,500 to do, and another $12,135 for repairs. The lightship was back on duty by the end of the 1901 summer season.
No. 50 served just eight more years before being replaced by a newer ship, and was sold at auction for $1,667.99 in 1915.
(Sources: Claftin, Jim. Column in Lighthouse Digest, Dec. 2004, www.lighthousedepot.com; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene: Navillus, 2006)
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