Manary Logging Company Train OrHi 51212

By the turn of the twentieth century, railroads had begun to penetrate to the isolated, waterbound communities of the coast. Until then, rivers, lakes, sloughs, and the beach were their roads, and the ocean was their gateway to the larger world. Because of their early commerce with ports of the Pacific Rim, coastal residents often felt more connected with San Francisco or the Hawaiian Islands than they did with Portland or Eugene. By the 1860s a traveler could sail comfortably from Coos Bay to San Francisco in four or five days. When steamships arrived about 1880, the trip could be made in two or three days.

Overland travel, on the other hand, was difficult. A trip to Roseburg (now eighty-five miles away by highway), consisted of a bumpy three-day horse or wagon ride over the Coos Bay Wagon Road, opened in 1873. The road started at Isthmus Slough and snaked up the east fork of the Coquille to Sitkum, then down to Lookingglass and Tenmile on the Roseburg side. Travelers had to feed their horses along the way and sleep in or under their wagons. When stagecoach service began in 1893, travelers could ride in somewhat higher style.

Their isolation fostered in coastal residents a sense of proud self-sufficiency. When the Southern Pacific Railroad announced in 1906 that it was planning a rail line from Eugene to Coos Bay, not everyone on Coos Bay favored the idea. One newspaper called the Southern Pacific “[t]hat ruthless invader of paradise.” Another writer argued that the Coos area had done just fine for itself and did not need a railroad. Construction was delayed until 1911, but the line finally arrived in Coos County in 1916. Besides opening the Coos Bay area to the Willamette Valley and other points inland, the railroad created Reedsport as a camp for railroad construction workers. Reedsport became a permanent town in 1912.

Most people on Coos Bay looked forward to the railroad’s coming, as did most around Tillamook Bay. “Tillamook is to be waked up this season,” said the Yamhill Reporter in 1883. “The puff of the steam engine and the swir of the circular saw will be echoed through its stillness before many weeks as a lumberman is putting up a mill of immense capacity where one of the rivers enters the bay….The erection of this first mill is a beginning of which the end cannot be seen. It is within reasonable probability that railroad communication will be established between Portland and Tillamook bay in a few years.”

In fact, it took a little longer. The Pacific Railway and Navigation Company started a rail line from the east side of the Coast Range in 1905. The line was finally finished in 1911. The railroad was nicknamed “Punk, Rotten, and Nasty,” because the combined effects of steep grades, hairpin curves, breathtaking trestles, and smoke from the firebox made passengers queasy. With the coming of the railway, the Oregon coast was finally linked to the interior.

© Gail Wells, 2006.

Themes: Transportation,Economics,Industrialization

Regions: Oregon Coast

Date: 1900

Author: Gail Wells

Summary:
By the turn of the twentieth century, railroads had begun to penetrate to the isolated, waterbound communities of the coast.