Oysterville

Oysterville is the boomtown the oysters abandoned — founded in 1854 when Robert Espy and Isaac Clark followed Chinook chief Klickeas through the fog to the tideflats of Shoalwater Bay, guided ashore by the chief drumming on a hollow log. The reefs were everything he'd promised. A peach basket of native oysters bought for a dollar in gold on the flat sold for ten in San Francisco, where a single oyster — smaller than the coin — fetched a silver dollar. By 1860, nine of every ten oysters eaten in San Francisco came from this bay, and Oysterville was the seat of Pacific County: saloons, hotels, a newspaper, and enough sin that when the Methodist church finally opened in 1872, the drinkers marched in a body to fill the collection plate and went back to the bars.

The oysters didn't last. By the late 1880s the native beds were fished out, and in 1892 the county seat moved away — legend says South Bend men stole the courthouse records in the night to seal the deal. Front Street slid under the tide, literally: at extreme ebb half the bay goes to mudflats, and the old waterfront is underwater at high tide. What survived — fifteen buildings, the church, the cannery, the houses on Fourth Street — became a National Historic District in 1976.

The file keeps Oysterville: the oyster gold rush, the stolen county seat, and the village that froze when the boom ended — one of the Northwest's first industries preserved in a town of about seventy people.

Oysterville is the archive's boomtown file — the dollar-a-bushel oysters, the vanished waterfront, and the district the tide didn't take.