Those were the days!

I don’t know if it’s the 39 years of teaching in me or the life-long interest in our local history or the fact that I majored in journalism back in the day when there were proof-readers and copy-editors. Probably a combination of all the foregoing, but sometimes I get irritated at the errors I read in our local paper concerning historical information that I feel everyone who cares about our history (and dares to write about it for publication) should know.

Not that I haven’t made my own errors — and some of them lulus — but I do hold writers of our local history to a high standard.  Especially when you consider that future historians will be researching “facts” in the archives of these very newspapers.  And, the whole thing is compounded when some of the “history” now being written about has occurred in my own lifetime!  YIKES!  So, sometimes, I feel obligated to try to correct the record, at least for my own satisfaction.

What set me off this time is the article in this week’s Chinook Observer on Page B4, “Recalling the historic ferries of the Columbia.”  The picture of Captain Fritz Elfving’s Tourist No. 3 just under the word “historic” brought a smile.  How many times had I ridden that ferry as well as the Tourist No. 2?   I guess that makes me “historic” too!  And many of my friends and neighbors, as well.

Until the Oregon Coast Highway was completed in the 1930s, tourism was for the intrepid only.

But the part of the article that I found jarring (and as far as I know, inaccurate) was this sentence:  Elfving founded the Astoria-McGowan Ferry Co. in 1921, capitalizing on the sudden popularity of the Oregon Coast as a travel destination.  Maybe so, but approval for the road that we now know as the Oregon Coast Highway did not occur until 1919 and Highway 101 was not paved and finished until the early ’30s (parts of it later). Then, and only then, could coastal towns connect with each other. Perhaps, Elfving saw the hand of tourism writing on that proverbial wall, but I do not believe that was the immediate reason for his ferry enterprise.

By 1921 when Elfving loaded up his first ferry, summer tourists had been coming down the Columbia to “the beach” for more than sixty years.  But it was the “North Beach” they came to because of its easier accessibility — not the “south beaches” of Oregon.  Commerce, too, between Astoria and the North Beach Peninsula was vigorous.  By my childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, Astoria was the closest “city” for shopping and all sorts of commercial enterprises.  And the only way to get there short of hitching a ride with a fisherman headed in that direction, was by Fritz Elfving’s ferries.

Nowadays, with the big box stores crowding out the fields and forests along the northern Oregon Coast, it’s had to believe that our still rural Peninsula was the big draw for 19th and early 20th century tourism.  No wonder Captain Elfving’s motives in beginning his Astoria-McGowan Ferry Company back in 1921 are a bit confused these days.  Historians, be alert!