On the East Side of the Tunnel
Yesterday’s power point program by Jim Sayce at the Community Historian’s meeting was fabulous. He talked about the development of transportation in Pacific County and illustrated his remarks with photographs (old and new) of major transportation routes and conveyances by water and land. And, as usual, I learned new stuff.
There was a question about the road that allowed vehicles to travel around Chinook Point when the tunnel was built through Scarborough Hill. According to Jim’ first-hand look for remaining physical evidence, such a road never really existed. There was, indeed, a plank roadway at the eastern side of the tunnel that went as far as the Fort Columbia dock, but as far as is known, the road did not continue around to the west side.
YIKES! That was totally new information to me and put into serious question an entry in my book, The North Beach Peninsula’s IR&N published in 2009. In that book, on page 98, I included a picture labeled “Ocean Beach Highway near Ilwaco, Wash. Columbia River with this caption:
On the West Side of the Tunnel
FINISHING TOUCHES. A small station was built at the west end of the tunnel, but it would not be until 1921 that the county would build a trestle road around Scarborough Head. Kay McGowan Garvin, born in 1911, remembers the drive from McGowan to Chinook School before the trestle was built: “We drove up and over Fort Columbia hill in a Model T Ford that had curtains of isinglass. Yitz Herring drove. It was a lousy road – just one lane wide with pull-outs every now and then. There wasn’t much traffic, but if you did meet another vehicle, one car had to back up or down until they reached a pull-out so the other car could pass, Riding to school must have frightened me because I wrote a will – just in case. I was about six.”
That great memory was actually from an interview I did with Kay a year or two earlier for a series for the Chinook Observer called “The North Beach Girls of the Teens and Twenties” published in 2006/2007. In that article, I included a little more of what she said: “By that time [1921], too, there was a county road between Chinook and McGowan which went around the Fort Columbia hill by way of a trestle… the Model T mode of transportation to school then gave way to a red school bus.”
I don’t doubt Kay’s memory. She was, as they say, “sharp as a tack.” Nor do I doubt Jim’s conclusions based on his first-hand investigation. That’s just the way it is when you are looking back in time and, until some additional hard evidence surfaces, we just have to keep an open mind. That’s a tall order for me. I always hope for closure.
Sydney: thanks for keeping us aware of the fact that “history” is a moveable feast; that not everything we read is true; that memories can be faulty; that you had to be there! (and even then…….)