08/29/08
The Looney Oregon Coast: Facts About the Famous and the Freaky

The real facts about the Oregon coast can be a truly odd ride - amusing, offbeat or simply wowing. Here, you’ll discover what you may find in Oregon coast tide pools and which things may be edible or make you fall and crack your head. There’s chucklers about a car sticking out of the back of a restaurant, a Sea Lion wandering the streets of the north coast and why no starfish will ever be accused of Type A behavior.
Celebrity Hot Spot in Yachats in the 70’s

In the 70’s, however, it brought a lot of famous names to town.
Then, it was called Beulah’s, bringing bands like The Drifters, Ink Spots and The Coasters. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, it was part of a coast circuit of reunion
bands. There are still some of those posters on the walls of the Landmark to this day.
Owner Bruce Olson noted how one recent big name bluesman called Terry Evans (Ry Cooder, John Fogerty) showed up to his gig in recent years and suddenly, gleefully recalled having played this place in its other musical heyday.

This building is also rather famous for a wild and crazy story where a car came crashing through the front of the restaurant sometime in the middle part of the century, coming to rest out the other side, with its front end sticking out, precariously balanced some two stories above the ground.
Hilariously, the somewhat cantankerous female owner at the time was asleep in a room just below the melee, and did not hear the crash.

Did you know: That the Seaside Aquarium was the first aquarium in the U.S. to successfully breed harbor seals
Did you know: That the Seaside Aquarium is the oldest privately owned aquarium on the west coast
Did you know: Some species of rockfish can live over 100 years!
Did you know: The fastest sea star is the Pacific Sun Star at .027 miles per hour. This means .027 miles per hour translates to 75 cm per minute. Not exactly NASCAR material.

Did you know: Geoducks, a type of clam, can live for over 140 years.
Did you know: Seagulls can live for over 30 years.
Did you know: There is less sand on the beaches of Seaside during the winter than during the summer, due to the heavy surf which sweeps the sand away.
Thanks to Tiffany Boothe of Seaside Aquarium for these. You can find out more about these fun facts and see the creatures involved at the Aquarium, which is on the Prom. (503) 738-6211.
The Weird Wonders of Oregon Coast Tide Pools
Tiffany Boothe of the Seaside Aquarium went exploring coastal tide pools one day and took note of the massive variety of life forms to be discovered, as well as talked about what sort of sea goo may make you slip and fall while checking out these colonies of wonders yourself.

“The slipperiest of these were the kelps and the iridescent seaweed. The Laver and Sea Cabbage are also quite slippery. Laver grows in the upper to mid intertidal zones, so tide poolers will run into this quite often. It is slippery and you can easily fall if walking on it, so be careful.
“Laver is also known as Wild Nori and is very tasty. Another edible seaweed I ran into was the winged kelp. The Spongy Cushion, Sea Moss, Black Pine, and the Coral Algae (both encrusting and leaf) are not very slick. Though I'm not suggesting to walk on them; you shouldn’t trample on anything around or in a tide pool.”
In fact, that’s often illegal, Boothe said.
She added that the Little Rockweed can at times be very slick and not at others.

What you now see as the Tillamook Spit, miles of what seems like unending dunes and hiking possibilities, was for a brief period a thriving resort town that hosted thousands of people in the summertime. But only 15 years later, the place gradually fell into greater and greater disrepair, eventually becoming a ghost town.
Now, about 100 years later, nothing tangible remains of this place. It is the ghost of a ghost town, completely reclaimed by nature.

There were around 600 plots set for homes, many of which were built, and Bayocean was well on its way to become the "Atlantic City of the West." That never quite materialized, however.

The honeymoon was relatively short. Its heyday lasted only a few years. The first man to buy a lot from Potter’s company, Francis Mitchell, started its first businesses and the post office, but also soon began accusing Potter of fraud. This feud lasted for years and split the town’s growing residency. Eventually, Potter’s company failed, and the resort changed hands a few times, closing and reopening periodically throughout the 20’s and 30’s.

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dvd+with+media+on+it&_sacat=See-All-CategoriesThe tiny town of Barview, just a ways north of Garibaldi, also got trashed by the sea in the early part of the century.

It went through a few phases of being occupied by a few here and there who tried to restart some of the businesses and even an artist colony or two. About 1970, there is one report from a former local - who grew up there when the Potters kickstarted the venture – about what he saw a few years before. At the time, he was in his 80’s, and rather forlornly describes seeing a “hippie” town occupying the area.

A year later, the spit was breached by a massive storm. That eventually “healed” itself, but Bayocean was firmly a ghost town and doomed.
The rest of it was bulldozed over in the 70's by the government.
Supposedly, at extremely low tides, you can see the remnants of a boiler in the water just off the town of Cape Meares. Some residents of that tiny village will tell you the diagonal shoreline of the village was Third St. at the height of Bayocean's brief romp. There was a 1st St. and Second St. back then. That's how much storms and tidal conditions had destroyed the place in the middle part of the century.
A few buildings were saved and moved to Cape Meares. The community gathering place there is the former school and church from the old resort. There is some talk you may occasionally find part of a structure in the form of a chunk of concrete or metal somewhere in the dunes.
That’s all that is left of a true ghost town.
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