Columbia River Maritime Museum
Without the Columbia River—the second-largest river in U.S.—there would be no Astoria, and this small, well-done museum in a shingle and glass-fronted building on the riverfront captures the history of the river’s exploration, navigation, and commercial uses. Centuries before the Columbia had a name, explorers from different nations had their eye on this mighty waterway, and the museum’s collection of rare European maps, dating from the early 1500s to 1792 (when Captain George Vancouver successfully sailed up the river), is something map-lovers will especially enjoy. The problem for most of those explorers, and the problem for vessels today, was that high seas and the Columbia Bar, a shifting sandbar at the river’s entrance, made entering the river so treacherous that the area became known as “the graveyard of the Pacific.” The museum has a collection of vessels—a Coast Guard rescue ship, a fishing trawler, a sailboat, and the lightship Columbia—that illustrate the types of boats found on the Columbia. One vessel on display is a small Japanese fishing boat washed up on a nearby beach after the Japanese tsunami of 2012. Another display features two cannons (or carronades, as they are called) washed ashore after a shipwreck in 1846 and discovered in 2013 after a violent storm uncovered them. There’s a section devoted to the enormous salmon canneries in Astoria that began operation in the mid-19th century and lasted until the 1940s. The newest exhibit (it opened in 2017) is called The Science of Weather and contains updated weather tracking and ocean conditions charted by NOAA (National Oceanuc and Atmospheric Administration), a studio that allows visitors to pretend to be a TV weatherperson, and some amazing footage of ships plying stormy seas—I actually got seasick watching and had to stumble away. Give yourself about an hour to see all the river- and sea-related exhibits in this fascinating museum.
Without the Columbia River—the second-largest river in U.S.—there would be no Astoria, and this small, well-done museum in a shingle and glass-fronted building on the riverfront captures the history of the river’s exploration, navigation, and commercial uses. Centuries before the Columbia had a name, explorers from different nations had their eye on this mighty waterway, and the museum’s collection of rare European maps, dating from the early 1500s to 1792 (when Captain George Vancouver successfully sailed up the river), is something map-lovers will especially enjoy. The problem for most of those explorers, and the problem for vessels today, was that high seas and the Columbia Bar, a shifting sandbar at the river’s entrance, made entering the river so treacherous that the area became known as “the graveyard of the Pacific.” The museum has a collection of vessels—a Coast Guard rescue ship, a fishing trawler, a sailboat, and the lightship Columbia—that illustrate the types of boats found on the Columbia. One vessel on display is a small Japanese fishing boat washed up on a nearby beach after the Japanese tsunami of 2012. Another display features two cannons (or carronades, as they are called) washed ashore after a shipwreck in 1846 and discovered in 2013 after a violent storm uncovered them. There’s a section devoted to the enormous salmon canneries in Astoria that began operation in the mid-19th century and lasted until the 1940s. The newest exhibit (it opened in 2017) is called The Science of Weather and contains updated weather tracking and ocean conditions charted by NOAA (National Oceanuc and Atmospheric Administration), a studio that allows visitors to pretend to be a TV weatherperson, and some amazing footage of ships plying stormy seas—I actually got seasick watching and had to stumble away. Give yourself about an hour to see all the river- and sea-related exhibits in this fascinating museum.
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