Tucker at Oysterville’s 160th Celebration

At Saturday’s festivities, Tucker Wachsmuth talked about Oysterville’s proximity to the rest of the world back in the 1850s and 1860s.  “We were right off the on-ramp to the major freeway of the time – the Pacific Ocean!” he said.

I love that analogy!  It puts our sleepy little village of today in proper perspective and helps explain why, within one short month of its founding by Espy and Clark, the town had boomed and gained enough population that it was voted the seat of Pacific County!  How was it possible in those days when access was an “in person” sort of thing – no telephones, no telegraphs, no radios, no internet – that the word spread so quickly?

Sailing ships!  The superhighways of the time were the oceans of the world and here sat Oysterville right off the bow of ships going north and south along our Pacific shoreline.  San Francisco was the hub; its harbor was one of the busiest ports on the continent with ships arriving and departing from all over the world.

Oyster Schooner, “Louisa Morrison”

After a voyage ‘around the horn’ or even around the world, the four or five-day jaunt up the coast to Shoalwater Bay and into the shallow waters in front of Oysterville must have seemed like duck soup.  Adventuring men, many of whom had gone bust in the gold fields of California, headed for the new Land of Opportunity – Oysterville and its treasure of oysters.  After 1854, the name “Oysterville” was as familiar to ship captains as “Astoria”– the only other port of note between California and the Far North.

And nowadays when our connectivity to the outside world is measured in little bars on our cell phones rather than by leagues at sea?  As many of our visitors realized on Saturday when they were listening to Tucker’s talk, in some ways we are more isolated and less connected with the outside world 160 years after our founding.  Ask any of the locals who were here during the five-day disconnect of the “Great Coastal Gale of 2007.”  They would no doubt agree that Oysterville’s on-ramp is no more.  And they would probably say that we like it that way!  Most of the time.