Every western ghost town is an object lesson. Oregon, with more ghost towns than any other state, has a full curriculum. In the places that emptied out when the railways lost out to highways, we can see how capital and technology, then as now, destroy homes and livelihoods as relentlessly as they build them. In the towns that fell apart when their mine tapped out, we can see that manic boom-and-bust extraction cycles have convulsed the west for its entire history.
But there’s one lost Oregon town that gives us a tightly focused image of the future. There are no remains of Bayocean for the visitor to see – they’ve long since been claimed by the waters of Tillamook Bay. Though the wild weather of the Oregon coast administered the coup de grace to the town in the 1950s, in truth, the residents themselves destroyed it by misunderstanding and carelessly tampering with the natural systems that allowed it to exist.
Real estate developers are the American west’s true legislators. In 1906, at the dawn of the era of mass leisure, TB Potter saw the four-mile long spit off the coast of Tillamook and decided that he could make it into “the Atlantic City of the west”.
With his son, TI Potter, he bought up the land for a song, and started transforming it into a holiday destination that would draw people from Oregon and the whole of the west coast.
The main thrust of the plan was selling plots to people who would use them for holiday homes. But he also planned and built a hotel, a dance hall and a heated swimming pool complete with a machine for making artificial surf. The swimming pool, or “natatorium”, was down by the ocean so that people could choose between it and the more bracing Oregonian surf.
He built it, and for a while they came. The first lots were bought by Francis Drake Mitchell, Bayocean’s most enduring true believer, who set up a pharmacy and retail store there. Six hundred more sold to buyers softened up with free travel and boarding, but never quickly enough to keep up with Potter’s voracious needs for cash flow as he tried to keep up the pace of development for what was becoming the largest city on the Oregon coast.
Over the first decade, the haphazard facilities showed the strain of building the place from scratch. The telephone system only connected to other numbers in Bayocean, not the outside world. The badly designed water pumping system yielded only a trickle in some parts of the island. There were concrete roads, but few cars, as there was as yet no road connection from the mainland.
The only means of transport for visitors to get to Bayocean was Potter’s yacht, also called Bayocean, which sailed back and forth from Portland once a week. This trip was occasionally terrifying: passengers had to cross the infamously treacherous Columbia river bar and the mouth of Tillamook Bay, which was also frightening in rough weather.
The residents demanded a protective jetty to smooth this journey. The US army corps of engineers took one look at the bay and said they’d need two. The residents, who had to put up half the cost, would have to shell out over a million dollars, so they settled for one (this still cost each resident $450 – a huge sum in 1917).
This is the way they ended up paying for the destruction of their own property, and the city. The jetty changed the current, which began steadily wearing away the sand on which the whole town rested. The Potter family got out in the early 1920s, as the resort became mired in legal troubles. As early as 1928, when the road was finally built, the seaward side of the spit had been significantly eroded. It didn’t stop.
Every bit of rough weather now posed an existential threat to Bayocean. In 1932, a massive storm destroyed the natatorium. By 1938, 59 homes had disappeared, and residents had long since begun fleeing in earnest.
A few held on, like old Francis Mitchell, the first resident, whose stubbornness is still a local legend. In the early 1950s he was still trying to rebuild the spit with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
In 1952, the spit became an island, when heavy seas smashed through the barrier, altering the ecological balance of the bay and the estuary that fed into it. In 1953, the post office closed and all residents were evacuated. In 1960, the last house fell into the ocean.
Erosion has claimed houses on the coast of the Pacific Northwest since then, and the conditions that bring this about are worsening. Professor Scott Burns from Portland State University says: “Global warming will produce more El Niño events.” For the Oregon Coast, and the north-west in general, that means more storms. Combined with rising seas, that means trouble for beachfront settlements.
Burns is one of those urging local authorities to locate all essential services 50ft or higher above the water. They also need to stand up to developers who want to build too close to a coast that will be subject to more erosion than ever.
If we hubristically ignore the natural systems we live, in “we will likely see more Bayoceans in the future”.
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