THE ASTORIA ARCHIVE · Open this section in the Archive
← Back to the front page
The Museum Walk
The town's years in order, gallery by gallery. Every gallery leads with what it can show, and every stop is a record in this Archive. Enter at any gallery; at each gallery's foot, the way on is one tap.
The spine, drawn as the river runs
The walk's galleries with their years in proportion, 1792 to today: a long room where the record runs long, a short one where it runs short. It is the walk's table of contents, drawn once. The years themselves, and everything dated in them, stand in the Year Index.
Gallery 0 · The People of the River · Time immemorial to 1792The first gallery stands apart, as it stands in the walk: its years are the nations' own, and this line does not measure them. It only links onward, by law.
Gallery 1 · Ships, Journals, and a Winter Camp · 1792 to 1811Gallery 2 · The Fur Post and the Long Argument · 1811 to 1848Gallery 3 · A Town Gets a Name · 1848 to 1873Gallery 4 · The Working River · 1873 to 1906Gallery 5 · Fire and Rebuilding · 1906 to 1929Gallery 6 · Hard Years, a War on the River · 1930 to 1945Gallery 7 · The Bridge to Somewhere · 1946 to 1966Gallery 8 · The Quiet Decades · 1967 to 1999Gallery 9 · The Town Telling Itself · 2000 to todayBefore the galleries · Time immemorial to 1792
The People of the River
This gallery stands empty on purpose, and the wait is the point. It covers the years when the river's mouth was the Native nations' home, as it had been for centuries beyond the record and remains. What may stand in it will be built only from what the nations themselves publish, on their own pages, under their own words, never authored here. The survey that decides what can honestly stand here is still being read.
The nations' own pages stand first in the Learning Paths →
Gallery 1 · 1792 to 1811
A vote in the rain, a winter fort, salt from the sea, and the journals themselves, open at its center.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 2 · 1811 to 1848
A wrecked warship that named a beach, a post office that measured the distance from everywhere, and the traders' own books as its walls.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 3 · 1848 to 1873
A port of entry, a federal building of granite, a county seat won by a vote, and a fort raised at the river's mouth while a civil war ran far away.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 4 · 1873 to 1906
The record turns rich: a newspaper founded, a lighthouse lit, a strike, a wreck, and the morning paper of the wreck, whole.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 5 · 1906 to 1929
Finnish Astoria rising, one night of fire, and the town rebuilt under a new Column.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 6 · 1930 to 1945
A strike that won the hiring hall, a seaplane base dedicated the day before a world war, and the one night the war itself fired on the fort.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 7 · 1946 to 1966
The storm every later gale is measured against, the wave that reached Seaside in the night, and the summer the ferries stopped, told by two records that disagree about the day.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 8 · 1967 to 1999
A movie that made the town a set, a lifeboat tested in the worst water on the coast, and the Christmas Eve the bridge stopped charging for the crossing.
Enter the gallery →
Gallery 9 · 2000 to today
A fort burns and is rebuilt by its neighbors, the new century's great gale, a two-hundredth birthday, and a virus on a mink farm.
Enter the gallery →
Walk with a person
The people whose own records stand in these galleries. Open a name, and the person's page gathers all their records in one place.
- Coboway
Clatsop chief. - Sacagawea
Guide and interpreter with the Corps of Discovery. - York
Enslaved by William Clark. - William Clark
Co-captain of the Corps of Discovery, who polled the whole party at Station Camp and wrote down every opinion, including York's and Sacagawea's. - John Jacob Astor
The New York merchant whose Pacific Fur Company founded Fort Astoria in 1811 and gave the town its name. - DeWitt Clinton Ireland
Sold the first issue of the Tri-Weekly Astorian on July 1, 1873, at 10th and Commercial. - Captain George Flavel
Columbia River bar pilot. - Clara Cynthia Munson
Elected mayor of Warrenton in 1913, 38 votes to 22, the first woman to win a mayor's office in Oregon. - Daniel Knight Warren
Warrenton's namesake. - Attilio Pusterla
The artist whose sgraffito spiral climbs the Astoria Column, telling the region's early history in pictures. - Mark Hatfield
Governor of Oregon. - Dan Evans
Governor of Washington. - Frank Woodfield
Astoria photographer.
The county's own museums
The walk through records ends at real doors: the county's own museums, with the terms of visiting printed on their cards.
Clatsop County Historical Society: Research Center and Archives
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.
Open the archive
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.
Columbia River Maritime Museum: collections and library
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.
Open the archive
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.
Hanthorn Cannery Museum, Pier 39
The oldest cannery building on the Columbia, built in 1875 at Pier 39 (100 39th Street): three former freezer rooms of exhibits, four historic wooden gillnet boats with cotton nets, canning machinery, and life-size banners of the women who worked the lines. Much of it can be touched. The museum is run by the Hanthorn Cannery Foundation, founded in 2003 by former Bumble Bee workers and managers, and its own site carries history essays on Astoria, the cannery association, and Pier 39.
Open the archive
Access: Free, self-guided, open every day, 9 AM to 6 PM. Donations appreciated. No school or group terms are published.
The Astoria Column (Friends of the Astoria Column and the City of Astoria)
The 125-foot column on Coxcomb Hill: Attilio Pusterla's 1926 sgraffito mural spirals 525 feet of this coast's history around the tower, and 164 steps climb inside it. The Column and its park are held by the Friends of the Astoria Column and the City of Astoria. Its own site carries an illustrated history timeline and close-up views of the mural.
Open the archive
Access: Visiting and climbing are free; the park is open daily, 5 AM to 10 PM. Parking is $10 per vehicle, and the pass is good for a year. No school or field-trip terms are published.