This restoration shows an abandoned residence & car, one of the last buildings that remained standing in the once-thriving company town of Bradwood, Oregon as seen in April 1981.
The town was the company town of the Bradley-Woodward Lumber Company, and was incorporated in July 1930. It’s name was a derivative of the company name. Shortly after the mill began operations, work began on creating the town.
Bradwood was a location on the Columbia River situated between the towns of Knappa & Wauna, Oregon, about 22 miles east of Astoria.
With a shipping port and served by the SP&S railroad, Bradwood became the terminus for the company’s private railroad bringing down logs felled on Nicolai Mountain, milling them at the company mill & shipping finished products out by ship & rail. Lumber from the mill was used to construct the houses & businesses that were built to accommodate the millworkers & their families.
The mill and town thrived during the depression years and throughout World War II but afterward the once abundant timber stands dwindled and the mill ceased operations of it’s privately owned logging railroad. The mill continued on in operations with logs brought in by trucks & purchased log rafts for awhile. At some point, the entire operation was sold to Pope & Talbot Co.
In June 1962 the decision was made to close down the mill and a year later, on June 25th, 1963 the mill & entire town was sold at auction into private hands. Some of the buildings were moved or deconstructed but the rest were simply abandoned.
A major fire in 1965 destroyed the mill & much of the remaining buildings, and another fire in 1984 took care of what buildings remained including the house pictured here.
Today, the property is privately held, no structures or roads remain, and there is no evidence that the little community of Bradwood ever existed. In the mid-2000s, the site was considered for a proposed terminal for receiving liquefied natural gas (LNG). Protests & bankruptcies however derailed that plan and today the site is unimproved with posted “No Trespassing” signs.
This restoration shows the Bradwood Store, one of the last buildings that remained standing in the once-thriving company town of Bradwood, Oregon as seen in April 1981.
The town was the company town of the Bradley-Woodward Lumber Company, incorporated in July 1930. It’s name was a derivative of the company name. Shortly after the mill began operations, work began on creating the town.
Bradwood was a location on the Columbia River situated between the towns of Knappa & Wauna, Oregon, about 22 miles east of Astoria.
With a shipping port and served by the SP&S railroad, Bradwood became the terminus for the company’s private railroad bringing down logs felled on Nicolai Mountain, milling them at the company mill & shipping finished products out by ship & rail. Lumber from the mill was used to construct the houses & businesses that were built to accommodate the millworkers & their families.
The mill and town thrived during the depression years and throughout World War II but afterward the once abundant timber stands dwindled and the mill ceased operations of it’s privately owned railroad. The mill continued on in operations with logs brought in by trucks & purchased log rafts for awhile. At some point, the operation was sold to Pope & Talbot Co.
In June 1962 a decision was made to close down the mill and a year later, on June 25th, 1963 the mill & entire town was sold at auction into private hands. Some of the buildings were moved or deconstructed but the rest were abandoned.
A major fire in 1965 destroyed the mill & much of the remaining buildings, and another fire in 1984 took care of what buildings remained including the Bradwood Store.
Today, the property is privately held, no structures or roads remain, and there is no evidence that the little town of Bradwood ever existed. In the mid-2000s, the site was considered for a proposed terminal for receiving liquefied natural gas (LNG). Protests & bankruptcies however derailed that plan and today the site is unimproved with posted “No Trespassing” signs.
This restoration from the original photo shows the engine & crew of the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad’s Engine No. 4 at Astoria or Seaside, OR in 1904.
The history of the short-lived Astoria & Columbia River Railroad is given below:
By late summer 1883, the Northern Pacific (NP) had completed a route to Portland, Oregon, and was the first railroad to open the Pacific Northwest to transcontinental trade. Without a bridge across the Columbia River at the time, the NP used car ferry service between Kalama, Washington, and Goble, Oregon, to access Portland. The first saw trains arrive in autumn 1883. Curiously, despite Astoria’s status as an important port town near the mouth of the Columbia and Pacific Ocean, and only 50 miles from Goble, the NP made no attempt to lay tracks there. Desperately wanting rail service to their town, the city formed the Astoria & South Coast Railway (A&SC) in August 1888. The new railroad was chartered to run south along the coast and then turn southeasterly to Hillsboro.
By the summer of 1890, the A&SC was completed to Seaside, 15 miles south, which opened for service the following summer. However, the company fell into bankruptcy in February 1892 and was reorganized as the Astoria & Portland Railway (A&P). This new system was also projected to reach Hillsboro but via slightly a different route that would pass through the rugged Coast Range. Ultimately, this idea fell through due to lack of funding, and so the railroad remained stuck with its original 15-mile line and no solid plans to complete an outside connection.
During May 1893, the A&P was sold to the newly formed Seashore Road Company.
In 1895, the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad was incorporated for construction with a connection between Astoria and the Northern Pacific. A construction company was contracted to perform construction, and despite the fact that A&CR did not own the Seashore Road Company, the contractor invested in improvements to the line, including work on a new bridge to connect the existing railroad with Astoria, and a line northward on the west side of Young’s Bay to Fort Stevens and the area that would eventually become known as Warrenton.
In 1896, the Seashore Railroad Company started operating trains over a new bridge across Young’s Bay, connecting Astoria to Seaside directly.
In 1897, the owners of the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad purchased the Seashore Railroad Company & it was absorbed into the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad (A&CR). This new company, under the direction of A.B. Hammond, abandoned the proposal to reach Hillsboro and instead looked eastward to build a line along the Columbia River and a connection with the Northern Pacific at Goble.
A ceremony celebrating the opening of the link between Astoria and the Northern Pacific was held on April 4, 1898, but the first train from Portland did not operate over the line until May 16. Some 700 people rode the train to celebrate the completion.
In 1899, the last stage of the lines northwest from Astoria were completed, and the line was able to operate all the way to Fort Stevens.
In 1907, a short branch was built south of Seaside to Holladay. Here, a wye was built for turning the trains, and a connection to a logging railroad was also eventually made. In all, the A&CR operated 118 miles of main line from Portland to Seaside and an additional 2.7 miles along its spur to Hammond. Freight traffic predominantly consisted of timber products (logs and finished lumber) as well as canned fish and seafood products from the port. Passenger service to Seaside was incredibly popular. Beginning in the late 1870s with the construction of the resort hotel Seaside House, and through the early 20th century, the coastal town of Seaside was a popular destination that saw thousands of vacationers during the summer and the creation of the “Daddy Trains,” weekend trains that reunited workers that sought work in Portland with their families that still lived in the Seaside area. Tapping into this, the railroad promoted the route with pamphlets claiming “The Oregon Coast: From Portland to Summer Paradise in Four Hours.”
In 1907, with the railroad popular & profitable, Hammond sold his railroad to James Hill, owner of the Great Northern Railway.
Hill continued to operate the railroad under the A&CR name until 1911, when the operation of the Astoria line was slowly converted to the Spokane Portland & Seattle (SP&S) name (also controlled by Hill interests). The A&CR name did not disappear at once, but was simply slowly dropped from paperwork and other documents, as well as rolling stock.
For the next 6 decades, the SP&S continued to operate the former A&CR lines until everything came under the Burlington Northern “umbrella ” in 1970, following a merger of the SP&S; NP; GN; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; and a myriad of other, smaller “paper” railroads, such as the A&CR. The BN used the line to Astoria until 1978 when much of the route was abandoned.
The SP&S ceased passenger service to Seaside in 1952 but maintained freight service until the late 1960s. Following the Burlington Northern merger and abandonment of the line west of Astoria, the decision was made in the late 1980’s by the railroad to remove all tracks, ties & structures west of Astoria.
In the early 1990’s, the Burlington Northern also wanted to get rid of the line into Astoria due to high property taxes and little traffic. Astoria, however wanted the line retained so, after negotiations with the railroad, the city obtained the line, and today operates its city trolley over it.
This is a scan of an original menu from the San Francisco & Portland Steamship Co.’s SS COLUMBIA from Sunday, January 20, 1907. The ship was enroute from Portland to San Francisco when she became trapped in ice on the Columbia River from Jan. 16-20, 1907.
The Columbia was a cargo and passenger steamship, owned by the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company and later the San Francisco and Portland Steamship Company.
The ship was 332 ft long with a gross tonnage of 2,721 tons & a beam of 38.5 feet. She also drafted 23 feet & had a maximum capacity for 850 passengers in 1st & 3rd class.
Even before her maiden voyage, the little coastal steamer made history. Henry Villard, a long time financial backer of Thomas Edison and head of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company which owned COLUMBIA, tried repeatedly to get the John Roach & Sons shipbuilding company, builder of the ship, to install Edison’s new fledgling electrical light system on board. Roach refused citing the fear of a fire hazard. Undaunted, Villard sailed the ship from the builder’s yard to New York City, where Edison himself & his assistants installed the system, The result was that COLUMBIA carried the first complete marine electric lighting system aboard any maritime vessel anywhere! COLUMBIA’s success with the lights paved the way for the first effective transatlantic liner installation aboard the Cunard Line greyhound SERVIA in 1881.
COLUMBIA was the first true electric ship, with more than 100 light bulbs gracing the iron hulled steamer. In fact, COLUMBIA was the first mass installation of an electric lighting system outside of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratories and the first true public use. COLUMBIA’s popularity and reliability along the San Francisco, California to Portland, Oregon run whilst showing off the Edison lamps was the publicity Edison needed to overcome his opponents and naysayers.
COLUMBIA made her maiden voyage from New York to Portland, OR via San Francisco in July 1880 with a cargo load of of 13 steam locomotives and 200 or more units of railroad rolling stock to be used in the rail network of COLUMBIA’s owners.
The ship remained in service on her San Francisco-Portland route with stops at Astoria, OR until 1907. Always a favorite ship by the travelling public for her reliability & timeliness & high regard for her Captain, Pete Doran for his safety record & courtesy, the ship nonetheless could not escape her oncoming cruel fate.
Six months to the day from the date on this menu, Columbia with 251 passengers & crew were outbound from San Francisco enroute to Portland. She was in rough seas & surrounded by dense fog about 12 miles out from Shelter Cove, California running at reduced speed when suddenly appearing put of the fog, she was rammed on the starboard bow by the lumber schooner SAN PEDRO at approximately 12:20am.
Badly holed, COLUMBIA rapidly started filling with water & sinking by the bow. COLUMBIA’s crew valiantly tried to get passengers to the lifeboats, Captain Doran standing on the bridge trying to maintain calm & issuing directions to his crew. Unfortunately, the ship developed a list to starboard & the boats were at the waterline before they could be launched. Crewmembers desperately tried to cut the lines and were partially successful but the ship’s stern rose up as the bow disappeared under the waves & COLUMBIA sank to the bottom in 8.5 minutes. Capt. Doran held onto the railing of his bridge as his ship went down, passengers recalling his last words “God bless you all! Goodbye” as he & his ship disappeared.
In all, 88 passengers & crew including all the children on board COLUMBIA lost their lives. Survivors were picked up by the SAN PEDRO & COLUMBIA’s running mates GEORGE ELDER, ROANOKE & POMONA.
The SAN PEDRO, though badly damaged, stayed afloat due to her deck load of lumber. Survivors taken onto the schooner were transferred to the ELDER which also towed the waterlogged SAN PEDRO into Shelter Cove. The schooner was later repaired & returned to service.
From the subsequent inquiry into the disaster, it was determined that both ships bore some responsibility for the accident though more blame was laid on the SAN PEDRO. Captain Doran of the COLUMBIA and First Officer Hendrickson of the SAN PEDRO were found to have the most responsibility for the collision. This led to Hendrickson’s license being revoked for five years. In addition, Captain Magnus Hanson of the San Pedro was found to have given insufficient orders to his crew. He also did not come to the schooner’s bridge when warned of the fog. Hanson’s license was revoked for one year but despite the errors made by both crews, the survivors and press gave praise to most of the crew members aboard COLUMBIA and SAN PEDRO for their courageous and lifesaving actions exhibited during the disaster.
The little coastal steamer who blazed a trail that forever changed maritime travel with her electric lights saw those lights extinguished on a foggy July night off the California coast.
This restoration from the original badly damaged glass negative shows the new coastal steamship HUMBOLDT in November 1896, near the time of her launching, at Eureka, California.
She was originally designed as a lumber & freight schooner but was converted to passenger ship for the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. The ship is shown here before her boat deck was extended over the stern.
The ship was built for & owned by Max Kalish & operated as the flagship of his Humboldt Steamship Co. The ship was 213 feet long with two masts; breadth of 31 feet, drafting 15.7 feet & 1075 gross tons. Her top speed was 14 knots. After her conversion to passenger vessel, she had a capacity of 36 crew & 140 passengers.
In 1901 the ship was chartered to the Alaska Steamship Co. to serve Alaskan & Yukon ports while that company was waiting to acquire new ships for it’s growing trade. During the gold rush, the Humboldt made many trips returning to Seattle with her holds full with nearly a million dollars in gold.
While on a voyage from Seattle to Skagway on Sept. 29, 1908 in heavy fog, the ship collided with a rocky promontory near Vancouver Island crushing the bow back four feet from the stern. Amazingly, there was no loss of life and the ship was refloated, repaired and returned to passenger service.
The HUMBOLDT continued operating primarily between Seattle and Alaska until 1919, when she was sold to the WHITE FLYER LINE & her route was changed to mostly between Los Angeles & San Francisco routes until she was sold at auction in 1928 to satisfy creditors’ claims. The ship was infrequently used through 1929 then laid up at San Diego from 1932 until 1935. Throughout her 35 year career, except for 1898-99, the HUMBOLDT sailed only under the steady hand of Capt. Elijah G. Baughman, who started as a pilot on the ship for Alaskan ports in 1897. The HUMBOLDT was the only ship Baughman ever captained.
In the following bizarre yet completely true story below, based on Coast Guard reports, we are left to consider the bond between a Captain & his ship:
“After the HUMBOLDT was laid up in San Diego, Captain Baughman retired. By 1933, the old HUMBOLDT had been relegated to a dreary mooring in the San Diego boneyard and her retired Captain was now living ashore in San Francisco. Lonely & deserted, the old Alaska treasure ship lay quietly at anchor for two years…until the night of August 8, 1935.
That was the night that Capt. Baughman died … slipped his cable, as oldtime sailors used to say. And it was the night the HUMBOLDT slipped her cable, too, and sailed again for the last time.
Toward midnight, a Coast Guard cutter hailed an unlighted ship moving silently through the harbor. It was the HUMBOLDT, out of the boneyard at last and heading, with eerie precision, toward the open sea. The Coast Guard boarded her and found her warped decks and dusty cabins deserted. They marked it down as a freak of wind and current and towed the HUMBOLDT back to the ship’s graveyard.
No living hand, surely, guided the HUMBOLDT that night, but the relationship between a man and a ship who have lived their lives together can become a strangely mystic one. And there are more things on heaven & earth…and on the sea…than our philosophy has dreamed of.”
This restoration shows the old, abandoned (& now gone) Moore Mill Lumber Co. Truck Shop building on the waterfront at Bandon, Oregon as seen from the boardwalk in April 2000.
The building was built in late 1917 after Giebisch & Joplin Condensed Milk Co., of Portland came to city leaders to propose a new condensery for their operation which was quickly approved. The design & plan was to employ 50-60 people, & have a projected output of about 1000 cases of evaporated milk per day.
For all the enthusiasm of the town toward Giebisch & Joplin however, it was not returned by the company as two years later they sold the building to Nestle’s Food Company. Nestles expended more improvements into the building, adding new machinery, boilers & concrete floors & expanding the manufacturing capacity to almost 2500 cases daily.
Though Nestle had it’s best year in 1922, the cost of shipping & supplies from & to San Francisco and ongoing opposition from the Oregon Dairymen’s Coop eventually proved to be too much & the company ceased operations in October 1925.
Several years later, the building was sold to Jack Dalen, owner of Bandon Cedar Manufacturing Co. who used the building into the 1930’s until it was bought out and the business moved.
The building sat vacant for awhile and was one of the few buildings in town that survived a disastrous fire in late September, 1936. Moore Mill Lumber Co., also a survivor, and at that time the largest employer in Bandon, acquired the building and used it to store truck parts.
In 1945, Moore Mill’s ownership changed hands & the new management utilized the building as a truck shop making repairs to log & fire trucks.
Despite another fire in 1987 that destroyed most of the mill’s other buildings, the truck shop again survived but was deteriorating badly. Pilings underneath the building were rotting and parts of the building began sagging.
In 1997, the mill built a new truck shop & the building was vacated and sold to the City of Bandon for $1.
The city had hopes of renovating & developing the property, but the condition of the pilings plus further damage to the building by storms ultimately led city leaders to abandon those ideas. Plans shifted to demolishing the old building but again the city was thwarted when it was discovered that the structure was painted with lead-based paint. The Dept. of Environmental Quality advised the city that the affected parts of the building would have to be disposed of in a lined land fill, a process the city could not afford.
A solution to the city’s dilemma came in early 2001 when TimberCreek Inc. of Ketchum, Idaho, who had previously dismantled a building in Astoria, acquired the salvage rights to the building from the city in exchange for completely removing the dilapidated building.
The dismantling of the stubborn building was completed in August 2001.
Shown in these two restorations from the original glass plate negatives is the wooden schooner passenger ship NOME CITY at an unknown West Coast port in 1900 just after the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896-1899.
The NOME CITY was built in 1900 at Bendixsen Shipbuilding in Fairhaven, CA. The 230 foot vessel was 1,660 gross tons & displaced 939 tons. She was powered by a 1000hp triple-expansion engine.
The ship was chartered by the Pacific Clipper Line (later known as the Admiral Line or Pacific Steamship Co.) for passenger transport to the Klondike Gold Fields. After the gold rush waned, the steamer was utilized in passenger service along the Pacific Northwest coast with regular port calls at Seattle, WA; Portland, Astoria & Marshfield (Coos Bay) OR & several California ports, mainly San Francisco.
In 1902, NOME CITY had the distinction of rescuing survivors from two shipwrecks (WALLA WALLA & LAURA PIKE) in less than a month & ironically from almost the exact location of both wrecks.
Two years later, the skipper of the NOME CITY spotted a stove-in lifeboat from a British steel-hulled cargo ship (LAMORNA) that had vanished without a trace at sea near Vancouver Island. Defying nautical superstition about lost ship’s lifeboats, the frugal captain captured the lifeboat & had it repaired & repainted and stowed anonymously as one of his own ship’s lifeboats.
In 1904, the ship was acquired by the California & Oregon Coast Steamship Co. & reconstructed as a lumber carrier with limited passenger accommodations. After the rebuild the ship had a cargo capacity of 1,100,000 feet.
In February 1912, the ship was again sold to lumber dealer Charles Nelson & Co. of San Francisco, continuing in the lumber trade until 1937.
The ship finally ended her west coast career when she was destroyed by fire near Antioch, CA in 1937.
This restoration from a very damaged master negative shows the wreck of the steam schooner FIFIELD south of the South Jetty at the entrance to the Bandon, OR Bar in April, 1916.
The 173 foot, 634 ton schooner had a beam of 39 feet and drafted 12 feet. The ship was built at the Kruse & Banks shipyard at North Bend, OR in 1908 for the Arthur F. Estabrook shipping firm of San Francisco. She was powered by an 500 hp compound engine geared to twin screws & could handle 750,000 board feet of lumber. She also could accommodate 30 passengers whose rooms were nicely equipped with hot & cold running water & electricity.
Later owned by the Fife-Wilson Lumber Company, the Fifield made scheduled runs between Bandon and San Francisco, carrying rough-cut lumber and passengers.
The Fifield was returning from San Francisco in rough February weather loaded with 30-40 tons of hay. She arrived the night before she went aground and was waiting outside the bar for the tide to rise.
At 6:30am on the morning of February 29, 1916, she began her trip across the bar, following another schooner who started 15 minutes earlier.
When she got in the course of the current from the north, she was not far enough over in the channel and her stern was borne steadily down on the rocks of the jetty. The current lifted her off and pushed her to the south and then the breakers sent the doomed ship back on the rocks. The Fifield drifted, foundered in the surf and finally came to rest just south of the South Jetty.
Her entire complement of four passengers and 22 crewmembers were evacuated safely to shore.
In April, efforts were made to refloat the vessel & the IAQUA, a salvage schooner brought from San Francisco nearly succeeded in freeing her, dragging her almost 100 feet from her perch on the beach but before she could be refloated, a storm rose up forcing the salvage schooner to drop the lines & head out to deeper water for safety. The storm-driven surf slammed the FIFIELD back firmly on the rocks & beach & the unrelenting waves started splitting the hull & battering the ship to pieces as seen in the photo.
There was no saving the eight-year old FIFIELD now. The ship was abandoned where she lay & written off as a total loss for $150,000.
For decades the wreck was picked over by beachcombers but today leaves no trace from her 1916 loss.
This restoration of seemingly overloaded log truck being pulled by a seemingly undersized Ford was captured near Springfield, Oregon in the early 1960’s.
Yesterdays Trails 