A recent trip took us downriver to the one of the only remaining salmon canneries along the lower Columbia River.  Pillar Rock is literally at the end of the road.  To go further east, you have to get in your boat.  The cannery dates to 1877 when it was built over the previous spot where Hudson’s Bay employees used to have an operation which salted salmon.  The salmon were then transported to the Sandwich Islands – Hawaii – for sale there, with so-so success.  Lewis & Clark also camped here both coming and going along the river. Local Native Americans had long used the site as a place of encampment for years before.

SALMON HARVESTS

Charles Nordhoff, reporter-author of the second half of the 19th century described the Columbia as “… one of the great rivers of the World. It seems to me larger, as it is infinitely grander, than the Mississippi. Between Astoria and the junction of the Willamette its breadth, its depth, its rapid current, and the vast body of water it carries to sea reminded me of descriptions I had read of the Amazon.”

In the late 1860’s, it is estimated that 16 billion salmon used to run the Columbia River in one year during their anadromous life cycle.  Salmon was at the heart of Native Americans living on or near the river.  In the lower Columbia, large settlements could be found.  Those settlements took a bad turn for worse with disease during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.  Into the void came enterprising Europeans.

Canning as a method of food preservation came about early in the 19^th century, picking up steam, so to speak, by the mid-century.  Food then turned into a product available around the world.  Canning and the demand for overfishing to supply the many cans would deplete the vast salmon runs by the turn of the century.  The hydroelectric dams of the mid-20^th century would complete the devastation.

ENTREPRENEUR NUMBER ONE

Robert Deniston Hume came out from Maine at the age of 18 to join two of his brothers in a salmon-canning business in San Francisco, in 1863.  Four years later, the brothers moved north to open the first cannery on the Columbia River on the Washington side at Eagle Cliff, nine miles east of Cathlamet.

Marrying, Hume and his wife had two children.  The children did not survive long with the mother dying soon after.  The Hume brothers had prospered buying several other canneries along the river.  Robert, disconsolate, sold most of what he owned, returning to San Francisco.  He would return to the salmon business but moving to the mouth of the Rogue River on the southern Oregon coast, Hume departs from the story along the Columbia.

Each of the brothers developed a cannery and worked on increasing efficiency within. Many others who went on to canneries of their own learned first at a Hume cannery.

BACK ON THE COLUMBIA

Quickly, canneries began to spring up all along the banks of the lower river.  At the peak in the 1880’s, there were more than 50 canneries in the lower Columbia and its tributaries.  Astoria boasted 25 canneries by itself.  From the first year at Eagle Cliff, 4,000 cases of 48 one-pound cans were produced.  In 1895, the number of cases produced skyrocketed to 635,000.

nordhoff

Here is Charles Nordhoff’s description of a cannery operation in 1874:

The salmon are flung up on a stage, where they lie in heaps of a thousand at a time, a surprising sight to an Eastern person, for in such a pile you may see fish weighing from thirty to sixty pounds. The work of pre- paring them for the cans is conducted with exact method and great cleanliness, water being abundant. One Chinaman seizes a fish and cuts off his head ; the next slashes off the fins and disembowels the fish; it then falls into a large vat, where the blood soaks out — a salmon bleeds like a bull — and after soaking and repeated washing in different vats, it falls at last into the hands of one of a gang of Chinese whose business it is, with heavy knives, to chop the fish into chunks of suitable size for the tins.

“The columbia river and puget sound” Charles nordhof 1874 harper’s monthly magazine

canning is next

Nordhoff continues his description:

These pieces are plunged into brine, and presently stuffed into the cans, it being the object to fill each can as full as possible with fish, the bone being excluded. The top, which has a small hole pierced in it, is then soldered on, and five hundred tins set on a form are lowered into a huge kettle of boiling water, where they remain until the heat has expelled all the air.

Then a Chinaman neatly drops a little solder over each pinhole, and after another boiling, the object of which is, I believe, to make sure that the cans are hermetically sealed, the process is complete, and the salmon are ready to take a journey longer and more remarkable even than that which their progenitors took when, seized with the curious rage of spawning, the ascended the Columbia, to deposit their eggs in its head waters, near the centre of the continent.

“The columbia river and puget sound” Charles nordhof 1874 harper’s monthly magazine

unlimted supply

Nordhoff’s final comment on the future of the industry, “I was assured by the fishermen that the salmon do not decrease in numbers or in size, yet, in this year, 1873, more than two millions of pounds were put up in tin cans on the Lower Columbia alone, besides fifteen or twenty thousand barrels of salted salmon.”

BRINGING IN THE FISH

There were no roads or rails along the river.  All transport was by water.  Next to the canneries, shanties went up to house the fishermen and cannery workers.  In the early days of the canneries, most of the cannery workers were Chinese, hard workers willing to accept poor wages in isolation.  Chinese cannery workers were first employed by George Hume in 1872.  By 1881, over 4,000 worked in the canneries.  Labor took a hit the following year with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, however.

To catch the fish, the cannery operators rented small two-man sailboats and nets to fishermen mostly coming from Scandinavia or the Balkans.  The boats dragged long gillnets at night – so the salmon could not see the netting – catching the salmon by their gills.  As many as 2,000 of the little boats covered the waters of the lower Columbia from May to August.  Many canneries also used a steamboat to ferry their gillnetters out and back to the fishing grounds.

By the end of the century, runs and catches were declining due to overfishing and deteriorating spawning habitat upstream – mining, agriculture and deforestation.  The 1893 depression shut down many canneries.  World War 1 briefly brought some back only to followed by the worse depression of the 1930’s.  The last cannery finally shut in Astoria in 1980.

REMAINS – OREGON

Astoria’s waterfront is filled with old pilings.  Many of the logs used to support canneries long gone today.  As a child, I went on a tour of one of those canneries, naturally a Bumble Bee cannery.  Bumble Bee had a lot of history in Astoria and the lower Columbia, in general.  One of their canneries, Pier 39 on the east edge of town, has become a museum.  For the general public, this is one of the best places to get a sense of an industry having a huge and somewhat unique impact on the area.  Salmon canning still goes on, though the industry has moved north to Alaska.  Bumble Bee lives on, though their headquarters and canneries are only history here in a city amid re-invention.

Outside of Astoria, there were fewer canneries on the Oregon side of the river than in Washington.  You can find ruins at Clifton – found north of the Bradley Wayside Park on US 30, 12 miles or so upriver from Astoria – and Mayger, on the river between Clatskanie and Rainier, another dozen or miles upriver.

REMAINS – WASHINGTON

Moving upstream from the Astoria-Megler Bridge on Washington Highway 401, past the State Rest Area commemorating a week-long weather-enforced stay by the Lewis & Clark team at Dismal Nitch, are a large grouping of pilings.  This was the cannery at Hungry Harbor.  For several years now, the remains of the former USS Plainview, a former experimental hydroplane craft developed for the Navy lay abandoned here.  A local fisherman purchased the boat hoping to remodel the boat for use fishing.  Nothing like a recession, however, to dry up funds.

KANPPTON

Around the next corner, more pilings in the river make up the Knappton Cove docks where emigrant boats used to pull in for the little building – a museum today – which served as a hospital building for a quarantine and custom station for immigrants.  Many of the immigrants included Chinese needed desperately to run the canneries, but migrants despised outside by other migrants, more numerous and afraid of the unknown.  Before the US government came here, another cannery built by the Hume brothers here operated from 1867 until 1897.  The government bought the site in 1899 and used the station until 1938 through which hundreds of immigrants from Asia and Europe passed. 

By car, you leave the river shortly after passing the old quarantine station.  The road moves north several miles through forests cut and recut through the years on the east edge of the Bear River Mountains.  Passing the community of Naselle with roads revealing Finnish ancestry, you turn east onto Washington Highway 4, the north bank of the Columbia’s answer to US 30 on the Oregon side.  Like the road situation in the Columbia Gorge, the highway on the Washington side was more difficult to build, coming later.

ONWARD

Driving east, you pass the Deep River valley and head up the Grays River valley.  In the upper part of this valley lies an old picturesque, covered bridge amid the rural pastureland along the little river.  Bald eagles can be found lining the river, certain signs fish are running in the waters.  At the little store and post office in Rosburg, turn south onto the Altoona-Pillar Rock Road, once a separate Washington State Highway.  Some wanted Highway 4 to use this route along the river to Skamokawa, but a local politician, William Meserve, was able to get the State to develop a route up over the local mountains to run past his commercial establishments in the upper part of Grays River valley.

ALTOONA

The Altoona-Pillar Rock Road is a slow road.  It twists and turns.  The road is, for all of that, a beautiful route.  For a long time, the road was Washington Route 403, but in the early 1990’s, the road was taken out of the Washington highway system. As you round Grays Bay on its east side, you reach the main channel of the Columbia.  Here lay several of the former canneries on the lower part of the river.  The last few miles form a Cannery Row-Columbia-style.

Altoona Cannery was one of the sites of a local Native American – the Wahkiakums – summer camp along the river where they fished from.  Hudson’s Bay Company used the site to receive fish at and then salt them.  Danish emigrant, Hans Peterson named the community for Altona in Germany along the Elbe River – Altona technically a west suburb of Hamburg, though the two cities flow together.  The Altoona Mercantile and Fish Company Cannery began in 1903.  The site had been the site of a fish receiving station opened by one of the Hume brothers, William, in 1890.  A fleet of 25-foot gillnet sailboats operated out of the station at night, the Altoona version of the “Butterfly Fleet”. 

BUMBLE BEE ALIGHTS IN ALTOONA

The Columbia River Packers Association purchased the cannery in 1935 when they also moved their headquarters here to Altoona.  The road did not reach Altoona until 1943.  The CRPA developed after a fisherman’s strike in 1896 showed the multiple canneries unable to present a united front against the fishermen.  Ten canneries along the river and another plant at Bristol Bay in Alaska came together into a local corporation to counter labor problems.  Several of the canneries subsequently closed as the company was able to operate more efficiently.  CRPA eventually took on the name of one of its brands – Bumble Bee started in 1910 – reforming as Bumble Bee Seafoods, Inc with albacore tuna replacing salmon as the principal product of the company.  Bumble Bee continues today as the largest branded seafood company in North America, though they have long since moved out of the lower Columbia River.

The cannery here at Altoona closed in 1947.  For many years, the cannery remained atop its piers in the river.  Storms in the late 1990’s caused logs to get into the piers, however.  The logs jostling around below caused the building above to collapse into the river.  One of the newer gillnet boats – sails replaced by gasoline engines in the early 1900’s – sits at the Wahkiakum County Fairgrounds just off Highway 4 in nearby Skamokawa.  It is very similar to the popular Fish and Chips boat, the Bowpicker found in Astoria across from the Maritime Museum.

MOVING UP RIVER

Other ruins lie just to the east of the cannery piers.  Here stood the Klevenhusen Cold Storage Plant was built in 1905.  This plant stayed in business until it burnt in 1932 leaving some piers and a boiler and engine behind out in the river.

From Altoona to Pillar Rock, the road gets narrow.  A large landslide occurred on the road this past winter closing the road for a while.  Winter can bring floods to the road, especially in the area of the Grays River valley.  Just as easily, landslides can make locals dependent upon the river for transportation once again, as well.

PILLAR ROCK

Originally, Pillar Rock stoodd 75 to 100 feet above the river.  Today, it stands some 25 feet out of the waters, flattened to install a navigation marker and a light.  The rock originally named Taluaptea, a chief who upset localspirits.  In Wahkiakum mythology, enough to get you turned to stone.

The Lewis & Clark group camped near the rock twice – 7 November and 25 November 1805.  The first campo was where they thought they had reached the ocean at long last.  The second camp was after they backtracked along the Washington shore to try and find a way across the river.  Once across, they erected their winter camp at Fort Clatsop.

The rock officially named by Charles Wilkes in 1841 who with difficulty managed to ascend it from the water.  Like other lava pillars you pass along the road in, the underwater base of the pillar is not much wider than what you can see above the waterline.

Like at Altoona, the Hudson’s Bay Company established a fish-receiving station and saltery here at Pillar Rock.  The salted fish shipped off to the Sandwich Islands. 

THE BOSS OF PILLAR ROCK

John Temple Mason Harrington was originally from County Cork in Ireland before a term in the Royal Navy during the Crimean War.  He made his way to California looking for gold before finding himself on the lower Columbia as a fisherman in the 1860’s.  In 1877, he combined with Slyvester Farrell and Richard Everding of Portland, two well known brokers to establish the Pillar Rock Packing Company.  Harrington did well enough to take annual vacations back to Britain.  Known as the “Boss” of Pillar Rock, Harrington’s image appeared on one of the company brands – Boss Brand.  He retired as Laird of Pillar Rock in 1910 living on a country estate in Northumberland County of England near Ainwick.

The cannery was purchased by the New England Fish Company – NEFCO – in 1930.  Salmon runs were on the definite downswing by this time, though the cannery operated until.  NEFCO lasted until 1980.  The company town of Pillar Rock with its abandoned cannery had been peeled away before that eventually landing in the portfolio of Del Monte Foods.  The Pillar Rock brand survives today purchased by Ocean Beauty Foods still producing cans with that label.

BROOKFIELD BEYOND

A quick note about one other cannery just a few miles upriver from Pillar Rock.  Slightly predating the operation at Pillar Rock, Joseph George Megler established a cannery here in 1873 near the mouth of the Jim Crow Creek – today, more politically-correctly known as Harlows Creek.  Megler came from Saxony living with his siblings in New York with an uncle after their parents died.  After serving aboard the gunship USS Lexington during the Civil War, he came to Astoria first to work in a cannery and then become the manager.  He served in the Washington Legislature for eight terms both as a representative and a senator.  For a while he was Speaker of the House.  After his death in 1915, his wife sold the cannery.

Named the Brookfield Fisheries after his wife’s hometown of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, census reports show a high point in 1900 when 479 people lived here. Fishermen were Croatian from Komiža on the western side of the island of Vis.  The canning crew was mostly seasonal Chinese. 

PILLAR ROCK CANNERY

At the height of the cannery at Pillar Rock, about 200 people lived here, including a number of Chinese workers.  Most of the workers only came up for the summer fishing season. In 1978, the whole complex, along with six remaining fishermen – three from nearby Brookfield – were purchased by local farmer Loren Gollersrud who tries to save what he can.

The Gollersrud family has fixed up the former manager’s house to live in as their own.  Just above the cannery, to the side of an old oil drum is the ruins of the former cookhouse slowly decaying in the wet Northwestern environment.  Other ruins lie in the woods above. 

The Chinese used to live on the east side of the cannery where they had a little store and opium den.  They came for the summer season from San Francisco, Portland or Seattle hired by a crew contractor. At the end of a season, they went back to the home of recruitment. Working in the cannery, the men could clean up to 1,700 fish in an 11-hour day. An 1888 government study showed cannery men could make about the same wage as the fishermen, $45 per month.

The Chinese Exclusion Act decreased the availability of crews, but improvements in technology offset the scarcity of crews. One major improvement was the development of the Iron Chink at the beginning of the 20th century. This machine prepared 45 salmon per minute for packing equaling the work of 30-40 Chinese workers.

Other workers included immigrants from Scandinavia and the Balkans. Fishermen brought in fish to pay for their nets, food, lumber, moorage with surplus given out in cash or credit at the company store. With time, the fishermen bought more and more of their equipment. Many worked in other fields outside of the fishing season in both the forests and on farms.

THE CANNERY TODAY

In the cannery building, in addition to the large receiving room and canning room, there was a large net repair room above; ice room, a post office-steamboat ticket office, manager’s office and the receiving doors through which everything came in and out along with other rooms complete the cannery building.  Floors are not always complete allowing drafts to swish in.  

Other pilings up and down river denote old docks where some of the fishermen went to work from their cabins in the woods.  Just downriver, the family has fixed up a couple of cabins to rent out on Airbnb, something we took full advantage of.

A RIVER RUNS BY It

Outside on the river, ship traffic of all kinds putter past.  We even saw a huge cruise ship, the Caribbean Princess, heading upriver slowly on her way to Portland for a date with a drydock to repair a damaged engine.  Kayakers – all boaters, actually – must put into play the unique factors of weather here before heading out on the waters.  Tide, current and wind play prominent roles.  Going downriver with the tide and the current can be a quick trip.  Wind usually plays a contradictory role either coming from the southwest in winter – in which case, being out can be downright dangerous – or the northwest in summer.  The shipping channel lies just offshore here, too, possibly magnifying mistakes.

VISITING THE CANNERY

The cannery at Pillar Rock is the best preserved and possibly last standing one from the Golden Age on the Washington side of the lower Columbia.  It is privately owned.  Mr. Gollersrud will give you your own personal tour if you can get a hold of him.  The easiest and best way is to stay the night or two in one of the cabins.  They make for a beautiful stay.  There are firepits and opportunities to walk on the beach at low tide.  At the end of the road, the only noise you here is the wind and the waves along the shore of the mighty river.  At night, the stars gleam.