Historians don’t remember it. Oregonians can’t recall it. But an Oregon Coast National Park came very close to becoming a reality.
In the late 1930s, the U.S. was at the tail end of a national park frenzy, with more than two dozen total across the country, including Olympic, Mount Rainier and Crater Lake in the Pacific Northwest. Advocates eyed another place to add to the system: a sprawling national park on the Oregon Coast.
The plan, outlined in a 1940 article in The Oregonian, called for 30,000 acres to be set aside on the southern stretch of the coast, from Gold Beach to Brookings. And, unlike a lot of park proposals, this one was popular. Locals were excited, Oregon Gov. Charles Sprague supported the idea and Oregon Sen. Charles McNary even introduced a bill into Congress to make it happen.
“The park may not be established immediately,” The Oregonian reported at the time. “But it is definitely next on the list of areas to be added to the country’s far-flung park domain.”
That was apparently the last time The Oregonian – or any other newspaper – ever reported on it. A search of state documents didn’t turn up anything about the proposal, and several coast historians had never heard of it.
The Oregon Coast National Park that seemed inevitable quickly disappeared, leaving a cold and lingering question: What happened?
The sun rises over Harris Beach State Park.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian
THE PARK THAT NEVER HAPPENED
I pull into Gold Beach on a beautiful January afternoon. Morning clouds are parting, letting streaks of blue give color to the winter ocean. I’m here to see the land once considered a shoo-in to become the country’s most ocean-dominated national park (with apologies to Acadia and Olympic), and to try to find out why the idea has all but vanished from the pages of history.
My plan is to tour the park boundaries – most of which are now designated as the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor – and stop by the Curry Historical Society Museum to do some research.
The land is easy enough to see, but the answers are entirely absent from local history.
Yvonne Pettyjohn, 70, who helps run the museum, was born and raised in Curry County. When I ask her about the national park, she says she has never heard of it. She later searched through archives of local papers and other documents at the museum’s disposal, but came back empty handed.
“I haven’t found anything,” she said. “I have talked to other people involved in local history and they have never heard of it either.”
I’m mystified. One day the park is a sure thing – supported by the governor, brought up in Congress, considered by the National Park Service – and the next day it’s gone. As if the proposal never happened.
Based on Oregonian articles, here’s a rough timeline of what happened with the park proposal.
In 1938, The Oregonian reported on an idea for a national park on the Oregon coast, highlighting its economic potential and beaming with pride about the “wild country.” The next year the proposal had “advocates” and was considered alongside two other potential national park sites in the state – Hells Canyon and Mount Hood.
By 1940 things had really heated up. In April, The Oregonian wrote at length about the state’s national park proposals, saying the establishment of a coastal park depended largely on local approval.
“To date local feeling on the coast park seems to be more favorable than toward any other new national park established in the far west in recent years,” The Oregonian reported. “Not only is [Gov. Sprague] favorable to the creation of the coast park, but he also adds that the proposal meets with the approval of Curry county.”
One month later, McNary introduced a bill into Congress that would establish the Oregon Coast National Park, a place, he wrote, that “embraces one of the most rugged and scenic portions of the Pacific coast, and is a practically unmodified area combining many outstanding geological and biological features.”
The bill went nowhere, but even if it had garnered interest that year, it’s unlikely that it would have made it much farther. The same month McNary introduced the park bill, Nazi Germany invaded western Europe. A year and a half later, on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the United States had a lot more than national park sites to worry about.
A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
As I drive south to Brookings, I pass the land that was supposed to be the national park. I’m a big Oregon coast buff, but even I’m left breathless by the sweeping seascapes and vistas laid before me. The sun is setting, so I resist the urge to explore and keep driving south to Harris Beach, where I’ll stay the night.
The boundaries of the Oregon Coast National Park were never solid, but they generally ran from Cape Sebastian to Harris Beach – an area that today encompasses four state parks on the southernmost stretch of the Oregon coast: Cape Sebastian, Pistol River, Samuel H. Boardman and Harris Beach.
I’m up as the sun rises over Harris Beach, the wispy clouds cast pink in a sky of light blue and gold. Huge sea stacks dominate the ocean, churning with heavy waves. My car is one of three in the park.
The sun crests the hills to the east, and I begin to make my way north. As I go, one spectacular scene after another unfolds before me. I stop at the Rainbow Rock viewpoint, where pampas grass stands tall against the wind, and then head into Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor proper – a 1,500-acre park that covers 12 miles of coastline.
Sea stacks loom just beyond Lone Ranch Beach; sweeping vistas cover Cape Ferrelo; stunning rock formations rise out of the ocean at Whaleshead, Natural Bridges, Arch Rock and Thunder Rock Cove. At the House Rock viewpoint, a small monument dedicates the area to Samuel H. Boardman, “the father of Oregon State Parks.”
This area was officially designated the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor in 1950, on the eve of Boardman’s retirement as Oregon’s first superintendent of state parks. Boardman practically invented our state parks, transforming a chain of roadside pullouts into a world-class park system.
It’s a worthy honor, but by this point I feel compelled to ask: What about that national park?
A paragraph on the Oregon State Parks website hints at the area’s potential: “In the early 1940s, [Samuel H.] Boardman approached U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes with a proposal for an extensive National Park area along the Curry County coastline. Though federal officials toured the region, the coastal National Park idea did not take hold.”
But what happened? Why did it fall through?
The most beautiful stretch of the southern Oregon coast
Bob Sutton, former chief historian with the National Park Service, said the disappearance of the national park proposal wasn’t unique. All over the country, states proposed parks that went nowhere, only to shrug off the ideas and move on after. Sutton said what may have sunk the Oregon Coast National Park was simply money.
“I think what ended up happening is that it was expensive to buy out [the property],” he said. “I think WWII had an impact, but my recollection was that it was a lot of money.”
Of course, it wasn’t too much for Oregon to buy out, parcel by parcel, just a few years later. The money issue is important, but I think there’s more to it. Here’s what I think happened:
In 1940, after McNary’s bill went nowhere, the ball was in the National Park Service’s court to look into the proposal. It did, actually – in January 1941, parks director Newton B. Drury said his department was looking into, but giving no special consideration to Oregon’s proposals, according to a small item in The Oregonian.
We don’t know what the park service determined about the proposal. Money certainly was a consideration, but there must have been other factors at play. We may never know for sure: There’s no record of any publicly-released decision in state or local records.
In 1946, a delegation of state and national officials (including the National Park Service) took a three-day tour of Oregon’s parks, including the southern stretch of the coast. That may have resulted in some later state park designations, but no renewed interest in a national park.
That’s not surprising. In the 1940s, the park service held back from designating new parks, dedicating itself to more pressing matters, like protecting national parks from military-oriented mineral extraction. After Pearl Harbor, the park service established only one park site (Big Bend National Park in Texas) until 1956.
By that time, the Oregon Coast proposal was on the other side of a global catastrophe. McNary had died years earlier and Sprague was long out of office. Perhaps more importantly, Oregonians had begun to change their opinions about national parks in their communities.
At the end of the 1950s, the park service began looking into a national seashore, a lesser designation than a national park, at the Oregon Dunes on the central coast. Instead of the widespread support the national park proposal enjoyed, the proposed designation of the dunes inspired widespread debate. Even The Oregonian, an on-again off-again champion of the parks, was against this new idea.
“There has been a running fight on the Coast about the desirability of establishing a federal seashore,” a 1963 editorial said. “But we have not detected any burning interest among the bulk of Oregon’s citizens.”
The park service eventually established the Oregon Dunes National Recreational Area, but the decade-long controversy ensured that no park proposal at the coast would come easy.
‘PREDESTINED’
Yvonne Pettyjohn seemed surprised that she couldn’t find anything on the national park, but she wasn’t surprised that it never happened.
The community was supposed to get a lighthouse at Cape Sebastian, but Cape Blanco got one instead. They were supposed to get a bustling port in the 1920s, but that didn’t happen either. This is just the way things go on the southernmost stretch of the coast, she said.
“Something happened and we were cut out of the game somehow,” Pettyjohn said of the national park. “What would we call it – predestined?”
It’s more likely that a good idea got sidelined by money, or by war, or by seismic shifts in the political landscape. Either way, it was swiftly forgotten, leaving only a scant paper trail in the dusty corners of Oregon history.
There’s no good reason the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor couldn’t become the Oregon Coast National Park today. But whether the old dream ever becomes a reality depends on the very factors that sunk it in the first place: politics, money and public opinion.
Through it all, the stunning landscape remains – as rugged and beautiful as it ever was. National park or not, the southern Oregon coast is a treasure.
–Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB
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