THE ASTORIA ARCHIVE · Open this section in the Archive
Sound stands together here, so no record page carries a scattered player. Era sound stands at the archives that hold it, streamed under their terms, and one carried story plays here, in the Spoken Word section; the Archive keeps the links, the credits, and the way in.
More than 10,000 recordings made between 1901 and 1925, streamed free at their holder: the sound of the very years this page covers.
Access: Free to listen, at the Library of Congress.
Oral history: the town in its own voice, kept by the societies that recorded it. It plays at its holders, under their terms; what each entry says about access is the holder's own published state of things, printed as found.
59 interviews · about 184 recorded hours · 1998 to 2001 · Oregon Historical Society
Clark Hansen and his colleagues recorded the people of the Columbia River fisheries, and the Oregon Historical Society publishes the interviews with their audio and transcripts. The narrators named in the series include Bob Eaton of Salmon for All, Robert W. Schoning, and Phil W. Jensen, and the series is this section's anchor: the river's working generations, speaking for themselves.
Some interviews carry restrictions the narrators set themselves: Reed Burkholder's is partially redacted at his own request. A restriction is the narrator's right, and it prints here as a fact of the record, not a defect in it. The society's own page stands at the foot of this section.
Interviewed by Clark Hansen · March 28, 2000 · Astoria
A cannery worker and fisherman-activist tells the cannery town's working life in his own words, in the series above. His is the one voice this section names first, because his record already stands in this Archive's index of people, with a link to it.
Bernice McGregor Church, February 17, 1977 (SR 9547) · Elvia W. King, October 18, 1976 (SR 9576) · Oregon Historical Society
Two Astoria interviews from the nineteen-seventies, a generation before the Dissenters series, kept in the same society's oral history catalog. They are kept by the society, whose own page stands at the foot of this section.
38 tape-recorded conversations · 1988 and 1989 · held by the Columbia River Maritime Museum
Jim Bergeron, an Oregon State University Sea Grant extension agent, sat down with the river's gillnetters, with filmmaker Larry Johnson, and recorded an hour with each: Andrew Marincovich of Clifton, Cecil Moberg, Oliver Dunsmoor, and Arnold “Toots” Petersen are among the narrators. The museum holds the tapes.
In person only. No public streaming of the tapes exists, and none of the film drawn from them either: Work Is Our Joy (1989), which stands in The Theater. No transcripts were published. The printed gap is the honest one: the single most Astoria-specific spoken archive there is cannot be heard from home.
21 publicly available videos · volunteer-produced · Internet Archive
The Clatsop County Historical Society posts its own moving record where anyone can watch it: short pioneer interview vignettes of eight to ten minutes, and presentations from its Thursday Night Talks and the Seaside History and Hops series. Rights ride with each item as the society posted them; play them there.
46 and more full interviews · not publicly viewable · Clatsop County Historical Society
A second society collection holds the full raw interviews, and its own name for the collection carries the word Restricted. The interviews are not publicly viewable, because the editing is not finished. Each one was captioned, and the caption text sits inside the searchable record, so a researcher can search a word and find the exact minute it was spoken; hearing it runs through the society's curator, by request.
This Archive does not inventory what is inside those interviews. It points to the collection and the key, and prints the restriction exactly as the society states it.
NOAA Fisheries · oral histories of the nation's fishing communities
The federal fisheries service keeps a spoken archive of fishing people, with a West Coast body of interviews behind it. How many of its narrators are Astoria's was not verified item by item for this record, and the entry prints that rather than a count it cannot stand behind.
Short films · 2020 · Oregon State University Sea Grant
Sea Grant's filmed interviews with Oregon fishing communities, made in 2020, play at their holder. They stand in this section beside the Gillnetters film of 1978, in The Theater, which Sea Grant also keeps.
National Nordic Museum · oral history project
The museum recorded the Nordic Northwest's immigrants and their children, Astoria's Scandinavians among them; Dorothy Anderson Penttila's interview is this record's anchor name. The museum publishes full timestamped transcripts, and no public posting of the audio was found: this is a reading link, and it prints as one. Read the words; the voices themselves rest with the museum.
Astoria Nordic Heritage Park · Astoria
The park that Astoria's Nordic community built for itself keeps interviews with the immigrants who built the town's Finnish and Scandinavian world. The park's page stands verified; whether each interview plays from it was not verified for this record, and the entry is a link, honestly labeled.
University of Oregon Libraries · Northwest Folklife Digital Collection
Field recordings of the region's traditional life, published for non-profit and educational use. Astoria-specific audio inside it was not verified item by item for this record; the link stands for the folklife shelves generally, and the gap prints with it.
One set of collections in this section the Archive only points at: the tribal nations' own tellings of themselves. The Chinook Indian Nation's site, the Chinook Story project, and the Confluence project's listening rooms, which by Confluence's own listing include an interview with Tony Johnson, stand in the first strand of the Learning Paths, where they belong. Nothing at those links is carried, excerpted, or summarized here. A nation's spoken record is the nation's.
The town has talked to itself on the air since 1935. What survives in public is uneven, and this section prints the unevenness: one station's living, streamable present; one community station's open window onto its own last two weeks and its program archive; and one honest empty space where the historic record should be.
A correction stands at the head of this section, and it stands everywhere this Archive prints the town's radio history: KAST, Astoria's station, first went on the air in 1935, not 1946. The wrong year circulates; the station history drawn from the federal record gives 1935. What happened in 1946 is the Ed Parsons ownership era, and Parsons went on to pioneer cable television in Astoria in 1948 and 1949. A decade earlier, in the nineteen-thirties, the station's manager was Robert D. Holmes, who later became governor of Oregon.
Community radio · Tillicum House, Astoria · two webstreams and an app
The coast's community station streams everything it broadcasts, and keeps a rolling archive of the last two weeks of its own air: miss a program and you have a fortnight to catch it. Older programs live on the station's program pages, below. That two-week window is the honest shape of the station's full archive, and this record prints the shape rather than pretending the whole run is posted. The station's broadcasts are the station's and its programmers'; listen at the station.
The county society's weekly radio program · KMUN · 90 and more episodes since January 2024
The Clatsop County Historical Society makes its own history program for the station, hosted by Mac Burns and Alana Kujala and produced by the society: about twenty-nine minutes an episode, week after week since January 2024. It is the closest thing Astoria has to a standing spoken history of itself, and it also stands as a podcast.
KMUN program pages · Astoria
The station's program archive keeps more of the town's spoken record than any other single collection gathered here:
Named in the volume:
Joanne Rideout · a daily maritime program · Astoria
Every day, the ships: what is crossing the bar, what is anchored, what the river is doing, in a program Astoria has listened to for years and which travels as a podcast. Its full transcripts are published free, which makes it one of the few programs in this section a reader can search word by word.
The transcripts carry their own line, and this Archive prints it because it governs: copyright Joanne Rideout and The Ship Report, all rights reserved, no use without permission. So this section links to the program and copies nothing from it. A model link: go there, read there, listen there.
The Maritime Museum's weekly podcast · new in the fall of 2026 · Fridays at 5:00 PM on KMUN
The Columbia River Maritime Museum reads the region's maritime heritage through one object at a time from its own collection: the first season opens with horse seining, then ferries, taffrail logs, and chronometers. It airs on KMUN and stands as a podcast at the museum.
American Archive of Public Broadcasting · KBOO, Portland
Past this county, two collections frame the region's radio memory: the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, kept by GBH and the Library of Congress, where Oregon public broadcasting's older record rests, and KBOO in Portland, whose archive runs to some 7,500 programs from 1968. No KMUN or Clatsop holdings were found in the first, and no Astoria-specific collection in the second; they print as context, and the limits print with them.
Historic KAST: no publicly posted archive of the station's historic broadcasts was found, in the Internet Archive, in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, or anywhere else this record searched: no airchecks, no transcription discs. The living station streams its present programming at its own site, which is a link to today. The historic space stays empty, and labeled.
No transcription discs were located for any Clatsop County station. What the county's first radio decades sounded like survives, in public, as one replayed fragment: the 1983 first broadcast of a station that did not exist yet when most of that history was made.
The records this coast sang on, and the songs written about its river. The National Jukebox, linked at the head of this section is this family's research backbone: more than ten thousand early recordings, free to hear at the Library of Congress under its own terms. What follows is what this record could verify, one by one, and what it could not.
Edison Blue Amberol 11712 · Finnish series · issued 1920 · Cylinder Audio Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara Library
Astoria's Finns were the largest Finnish community in the West, and the record companies knew their market: Victor and Edison catalogued Finnish singers the way they catalogued everyone's grandparents. Juho Koskelo, a Finnish tenor, sings Karl Collan's song of Savo, dubbed from an Edison Diamond Disc master. One cylinder is not the community's whole music; it is the one voice this record verified, in a transfer anyone may hear.
Rights, printed as the holder prints them: the University of California, Santa Barbara Library's restored transfer is licensed for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, with credit to the University of California, Santa Barbara Library. It plays at the Library's own page; the link is below.
University of California, Santa Barbara · the research collection behind the record shelves
Behind the Jukebox and the cylinder archive stands one discography: session by session, matrix by matrix, who recorded what, where, and when, including the ethnic catalogues the companies aimed at immigrant Astoria. It holds metadata, not sound: it is where a name on a label becomes a dated, placed recording.
Written for the Bonneville Power Administration · recordings held by Smithsonian Folkways
In May 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration hired Woody Guthrie for a month to write songs for its film The Columbia, the same film that plays in The Theater. He wrote twenty-six, among them “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” now Washington's state folk song, “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Grand Coulee Dam.” Print the distinction this record insists on: the songs were a federal employee's work for a federal film, and the film is public domain; Guthrie's own 1941 recordings are commercial releases, streamed and sold by Smithsonian Folkways, not free downloads. The link is Folkways.
Fit, printed honestly: these are songs of the river system and its dams, written upriver. They are not songs of Astoria or of the bar, and this section keeps them labeled as what they are.
Astoria Nordic Heritage Park · read for KMUN's Bedtime Story
The six Troll Tales of the Nordic park, free story booklets of the town's Scandinavian world, were read aloud by James Dott and Lloyd Bowler for the community station's bedtime program. They listen at their holders: the park's own page gathers them.
No canonical public-domain song about Astoria itself, or about the Columbia River bar, surfaced anywhere this record searched. The town's anthem, if it has one, has not been found in the free record, and this section prints the absence instead of adopting some other place's song.
The sound of the place itself: no individually verified, openly licensed recording of the bar, the waterfront, or the ships' horns was opened for this record. A general sound library is a lead, not a holding, and it is not linked here as if it were one. This section does not fake weather.
Inside the National Jukebox stands a Finnish catalog this record has not yet read title by title; a prepared Finnish listening list waits on that check, and on a reading of the Jukebox's own pages that this record still owes. The link at the head of this section stands meanwhile.
Poetry and story, performed. One performed story is carried in this section: the founding narrative, read aloud, because its book and its reading are both public domain. The working waterfront's own literature is a living one, and it belongs to the people who make it: for that literature this section is a link with the fence printed on it, because the fence is part of the record.
Washington Irving's Astoria (1836), the founding narrative of the fur post at the river's mouth, read aloud whole by Carol Pelster for LibriVox: eighteen hours and thirteen minutes, chapter by chapter, in the Internet Archive's own player. The Tonquin, the post's building, the overland parties, and the war that ended the enterprise are all here, in the words of the book this town's written story starts from.
Public domain: Irving's book is of 1836, and LibriVox recordings are released into the public domain by the readers who make them; the Internet Archive's record of this recording carries the Public Domain Mark 1.0. It plays here inside the Internet Archive's own player.
The recording at the Internet Archive
From the record at its source
"Astoria" describes the many perilous adventures, discoveries, and disasters experienced by the brave Americans who joined the 1810-1813 Astor Expedition to Oregon. The wealthy New York fur magnate John Jacob Astor masterminded an extensive enterprise with the hope of setting up a fur trading center and outpost of American colonization at the mouth of the Columbia River.
An independent project · records the FisherPoets Gathering's performances · podcast and video, year by year
Since the Gathering began filling Astoria's theaters every February, this project has recorded the performances, at the Liberty Theater, the Columbian Theater, the Ten Fifteen Theater, and Astoria Brewing Company, and publishes them as the FisherPoetry Archive Podcast and as video episodes, gathering by gathering: 2023 and 2024 stand published. Its site is the archive of the event's voice.
The rights fence, printed as the project prints it: copyright the Fisher Poetry Archive Project, all rights reserved. This Archive links to it. It does not embed, excerpt, or segment a single performance, and it publishes no transcripts, because none are published for it to point to: a gap it cannot fill from outside.
Astoria, every February · reported in the Lincoln Chronicle, October 18, 2026
The Gathering itself, as the coast's own newspaper record reported it in the fall of 2026: a three-day celebration of poetry, song, and commercial fishing that draws about 2,300 people to half a dozen Astoria venues, from theaters to brewpubs, every winter. Its founder, Jon Broderick, is a former schoolteacher and a seasonal set-netter in Bristol Bay. In October 2026 the Society carried capsule sessions down the coast, Port Orford to Lincoln City, to recruit new voices against what its performers call the graying of the fleet. The thirtieth gathering runs February 26 to 28, 2027. And the reason this section is a link and not a shelf stands in Broderick's own words, as the Chronicle prints them: the organizers have resisted books and recordings for sale, because, he said, “We want to value the spoken word above all else.” The work is the event. What the poets keep ephemeral on purpose, this Archive does not fix on its own shelves.
The Gathering and its coastal tour, at the Lincoln Chronicle
Two holders, two rights, kept separate on purpose: when KMUN broadcasts the Gathering live, that recording is the station's, and it stands in the Radio section above. The Archive Project's recordings are the project's. A visitor who confuses the two misunderstands both, so this section never merges them.
The poetry itself, the poems as texts in the poets' own anthology and the public-domain verse this Archive can carry, stands in the Reading Room's poetry section, where the link to the Gathering's own online anthology also stands.
A BBC Radio 4 program on the Fisher Poets Gathering exists in the broadcast record. Its rights are the BBC's; it was not opened for this record, and it prints here as a named lead, not a holding.
Some of the record is a list of films nobody can watch. A catalogued film survives as paper: a copyright deposit, a catalog description, a cameraman's memoir. This section prints that paper honestly, and does not dress a want-list entry as a holding.
Selig · shot in Astoria, August 1909 · 1,000 feet
The first commercial narrative film shot in Oregon is gone. What survives is the paper: cameraman Charles G. Clarke's memoir of the shoot, the period press, and the production documents of the Selig studio, which the county society's Mac Burns traveled to the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood to read, as the Daily Astorian reported. One date conflict prints, because both are published: the Oregon Film Museum's own site has also given 1908, and the state filmography's title range begins at 1908 while its entry reads 1909. This record prints 1909, the year of the shoot and the release, with the museum's 1908 noted as its variant.
United States Fish Commission series and Selig Polyscope subjects · filmed at the river's mouth
Before the town had a narrative film, it had this: the Fish Commission's cameraman Herbert J. Miles filming the horse seines at Altoona, Washington, on the north shore of the river's mouth, for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, with copyright deposits of August 22, 1903. The Library of Congress's catalog descriptions of these films survive in print, quoted in full by the American Film Institute. No streamable copy was located anywhere this record searched.
Named in the volume:
Selig Polyscope followed about 1904, its director credited as Harry Buckwalter, with a question mark the record keeps: Hauling in a Big Catch, also titled Seining Salmon with Horses (AFI 45344; 50 feet), Hauling in Seines and Pulling Seines into Boat (AFI 45345; 100 feet), and fish-trap and cannery-unloading subjects of 75 feet each. The Selig subjects print as presumed lost until a holder surfaces. The named next place to look, for whoever takes it up, is the Academy Film Archive.
Universal Newsreel · fall 1941 · existence verified, stream not located
The title stands in the published list of Universal newsreels of 1941, and the National Archives holds the Universal Newsreel library as Record Group 200 UN. No free stream of this item was located. It prints here as a lead, with the way to follow it named, the catalog and the Internet Archive's newsreel shelves, and never as a holding.
No film of the 1922 fire surfaced in any collection this record searched, and no period film was located for the Astoria Column's dedication era or for the historic Regattas. The town's greatest disasters and celebrations of the film age went unfilmed, so far as the surviving record shows.
The Second World War on Tongue Point and at Naval Air Station Astoria rests, at the National Archives' Seattle branch, in text: Record Group 181.8.16 is textual holdings. Nothing prints here until a film item is in hand.
Two leads, printed as leads: footage of the Columbus Day Storm of October 12, 1962 may rest in television station or historical society custody, unverified; and no newsreel item for the bridge dedication of 1966 has been item-verified. Neither is a holding.
Examined and not carried: News Magazine of the Screen, volume 7, issue 2 (1956), was read for Astoria content and the content could not be verified, so it does not stand in this record. And the Prelinger Collection proper, for all its river films above, holds no Astoria-subject film.
The sections above point at records; these are the buildings. Access terms are printed on every entry, in the holder's own terms.
Clatsop County
The state's collection, with deep Clatsop holdings: aerial photographs of Astoria and Seaside, Frank Woodfield's photographs of the 1922 fire, early photographs of Seaside and Tillamook Head, and oral histories, including Astoria cannery worker Peter A. Huhtala.
Access: Free to view, and many items are free to download. Rights are per record: check the record's own licence, and ask OHS before republishing.
Clatsop County
The county's memory keeper, in Astoria: 35,000 historic photographs by the Society's own count, diaries from the 1840s, city directories, maps, and Finnish and Native American family history materials. Its scanning center has put more than 42 local collections on the Internet Archive, 4,357 items, free to read: the city directories and the school yearbooks among them, in full.
Access: Its digital archive is free on the Internet Archive. The photograph collection itself has no public database; photographs reach the public inside the Society's journal, its exhibits, and credited republications, and the rest is research in person: for photographs, ask the archivist. For a visit: one society pass covers the society's three town museums, the Heritage Museum, the Flavel House, and the Oregon Film Museum; ask at any of them. The Heritage Museum is entered by a few stairs, and an elevator inside serves its floors.
Clatsop County
The river's museum in Astoria: more than 22,000 objects, and a research library with more than 1,000 charts and maps. The museum counts its photographs two ways on its own pages, 35,000 on its Collections page, some 30,000 on its library page, and this card prints both counts with their pages rather than choosing. Its library catalog can be searched online, its journal's back issues stand free as PDFs, and its exhibits and lectures stand online.
Access: The research library is open by appointment, Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 to 5; staff copies run ten cents a page. The Quarterdeck's back issues are free PDFs on the museum's site. For photographs, ask the museum.