Oysterville’s Territory Road, 1902

     After a hiatus of more than year, I am back to a book project that threatens to last for the rest of my life.  Like Dear Medora, Child of Oysterville’s Forgotten Years, it is based on family information – letters, diaries, photo albums and the like.  It goes slowly, partly because I become immersed in my research and have difficulty getting down to the writing part.
     Yesterday I was dealing with some of my grandmother’s recollections of her first visit to Oysterville in 1898.  She (Helen Richardson) was a city girl from East Oakland, California where she had grown up with all the ‘modern conveniences’ such as running water and electric lights and trolleys into town.  She had married my grandfather from far-off Oysterville in November 1897.   The following summer they made the arduous journey to Oysterville so that she could meet her new mother-in-law, Julia Jefferson (Mrs. R. H. Espy.)  In the 1930s Helen wrote down some of her first impressions:
     When I came here forty years ago Mother Espy was using whale ribs as chicken perches. The highway along the Bay front was referred to as the Road to Nahcotta.  It was a three hours’ ride from Astoria to Ilwaco by Baker’s Bay.  From there we travelled on a narrow gauge train which ran by the tides.  The boat, which it met, could only come in at certain heights of the tide, I doubt if the train traveled 25 mph…
     Just before that first trip north, her new brother-in-law, Ed Espy, had been visiting in East Oakland.  They talked a bit about Oysterville, but even so, she was totally unprepared:
     I didn’t know what to expect of Oysterville.  Ed … kept talking about “the ranch” – when I asked him if he lived in the country he said, “Oh no, our house is right in the center of town.”  I saw people pumping water out in their front yards and taking it into the house in buckets.  But the Espys were more civilized.  Their pump was on the back porch.
     We arrived on a fairly decent day.  But a day or so later there was a big storm with a tremendously high tide.  We were surrounded by water.  Tina Wachsmuth came down the street in a rowboat.  I was on the front verandah.  Waves came up to the front fence.  The ocean was roaring just as if it were trying to break loose.  I never wanted to see the place again.     I was just barely nineteen years old.  I have often wished I were older and more experienced and tolerant.
     Little did she realize that five short years later she and her husband and first two children would move to Oysterville for a “temporary stay” which would turn into a lifetime residency.  The adjustment to “country living” took her a long time, but she eventually grew to love Oysterville and the people who lived there and the way of life which was so different from what she had known as a girl.