New book tells history of a lost, coastal Oregon town, Bayocean

Today, Tillamook Bay is largely separated from the ocean by a 4-mile-long spit of sand and scrub brush known for its beach and hiking trail. But in the early 1900s, this strip of land was home to an ocean resort town, complete with an indoor dance pavilion and swimming pool, along with houses, cabins and roads. Jerry Sutherland’s new book “Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon” tells the story of how this area was built and later destroyed. He joins us to share the history.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Today, Tillamook Bay is largely separated from the ocean by a four mile long spit of sand and scrub brush known for its beach and hiking trail. But in the first half of the 20th century, the strip of land was home to an ocean resort town complete with a huge pool, three hotels, 42 bungalows, a store, some restaurants, and dancehalls. The Portland historian Jerry Sutherland’s new book “Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon” tells the story of how this area was built by people and later destroyed by mother nature. Jerry Sutherland joins us now, welcome to the show.

Jerry Sutherland: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: What was the area that became Bayocean like before European Americans arrived?

Sutherland: It was all mostly sand, especially up at the north end, all moving dunes. The central part had a lot of trees on it. The southern part was grass and shrubs with a few trees.

Miller: And how did Native tribes use that land or that sand?

Sutherland: Well, they actually had a village at the south end where they lived year round, before white settlement; they would hunt for elk up in the hills. The northern-central part of the spit is real hilly, with a lot of trees, and so they would hunt there. They would fish along the shores, crab like we do nowadays and hunt ducks [and] all that sort of stuff.

Miller: How did early white settlers use the area?

Sutherland: The first with the Hawks at the base on Cape Meares and they settled there to run cows out on the spit. So their land claim was just sort of the northern section of the spit where they could do that.

Absalom Hallock settled the middle part of the spit where Bayocean was eventually built, as a kind of an escape, a retirement from Portland. He built a little wharf there and set up some local fishing and crabbing operations to sell produce, things like that.

Miller: And then things really started to change in the early 20th century. Can you tell us about the developers who first came up with the idea of developing Tillamook Spit and turning it into a resort slash serious real estate opportunity?

Sutherland: Well, the Potters were from California. They’re kind of a rags to riches story. They were living in a boarding house in [the] 1900 census and Thomas Benton was the father, he was just a store clerk. Somehow he decided to go up to Portland ahead of the Lewis and Clark expedition to take part in the building explosion there. He met a guy named Harkness Chapin, who came from Minnesota. They were selling real estate and decided to develop property subdivisions over on the eastside of Portland, joined forces and built several subdivisions in Portland, including the Arleta, many people know about in Southeast Portland. They did really well.

Chapin went back down to California, did some property development in south San Francisco. And when he was down at Half Moon Bay, his son Thomas Irving, joined him – he was like 18, 19 years old at the time – to sell lots and evidently they discovered that selling lots with the beach view was a lot easier than selling them in city subdivisions. So they started looking for a good place to set up an ocean resort and settled on Tillamook Bay.

Miller: Why Tillamook Spit, in particular? What was the attraction for them development-wise?

Sutherland: Well, if you stand on even what’s there now at the south end of spit and look out to the ocean and back over the bay you can get a pretty good idea of why it was attractive. So many people fell in love with it over the years. It was just a phenomenal view. At the time, it was100 feet high; now it’s only 20 or 30. So it was just a phenomenal view.

The strategic purpose is that it’s the closest place to Portland and the Lewis and Clark Exposition had brought a lot more people to Portland. They had good jobs and they could afford resort places to stay during the summer. So this seemed like a good choice.

Miller: Closest to Portland, but ‘close’ meant something different back then. In terms of the transportation options, at the beginning before it was even developed, what would it have taken to get to what eventually turned into Bayocean if you were in the Portland area?

Sutherland: Well, that was a big problem. At the time, it took a couple of days of sea travel up the Columbia River out across the bar and back into the bar at Tillamook Bay. Both which were pretty rough. Or traveling a long wagon route down to Grand Ronde and back up with a stay overnight somewhere along the way. So that was a problem.

The Potters recognized that but one of their friends was Elmer Lytle , who was a railroad baron. He had started building a railroad from Hillsboro, extending from Portland, out to Tillamook in 1905. He promised to have it done by 1908 and that would make the trip a lot quicker and Potters took action.

Miller: How did the Potters market their dream to Portland or would-be buyers?

Sutherland: Mostly through newspapers, but they also had brochures. Court cases later on showed that they spent nearly a million dollars in today’s money on marketing. So it was really, really quite expensive. They had salesmen and eventually they would go out door to door and around the city to professionals primarily, but a lot of it was the sales were done in the office as well.

Miller: The sense I get is that that huge effort was only moderately successful. I mean, what were the challenges in getting people to buy lots in this as-yet, unbuilt development?

Sutherland: Well, that’s one problem the Potters discovered, is that it was a lot harder to convince people to buy a lot in a place they couldn’t see. They actually developed a little scale model so people could look at it and have a better sense of where their lot would be and what might be there. But yes, that was a big challenge.

Miller: Then there were construction challenges. Can you give us a sense for the early construction challenges that developers had to deal with?

Sutherland: Well, part of the problem was the railroad didn’t get done. The Panic of 1907 basically put everything on a halt. The Potters and Chapin had sold 1,000 lots right off the bat. So they were doing pretty well. But then the panic struck and that kind of shut everything down, including Elmer Lytle. By the time he got going again, it was still rough going to Tillamook through the Coast Range. So he didn’t get done until 1911. The Potters had counted on being able to use his railroad to ship in construction material. When they couldn’t do that, it got a lot more expensive and more difficult to bring it in by ship. So all of their promises and construction was dramatically slowed down and modified.

Miller: But they did eventually build various attractions. The one that seems the grandest and the one I think I personally, so wish I had seen, is the Natatorium. Can you describe what it was like at its height?

Sutherland: Oh, it was a really massive building. It would have been two stories high with the upper level being a balcony looking down over the swimmers. They would have bands playing up there at night. They’d bring down a movie screen so people could watch movies...

Miller [interjecting]:  When they were either on the balcony or in the salt water just bobbing around, they could watch a movie on a screen above them?

Sutherland: I don’t think they did that. They would have done that from the balcony.

Miller: Ok.

Sutherland [Continuing]: …but the structure was 88 feet by 250 feet. It took up five full city lots. The pool was 50 [feet] by 160 [feet]. So it was massive.

Miller: This was seawater that was then heated up. So it could be more comfortable than the often frigid Pacific. And then there was  a wave machine, as I understand it. So, for 10 minutes out of the 30 minutes, twice an hour you could actually get artificially created waves.

Sutherland: Yeah, when it worked.

Miller: Oh, was that, how often was that an issue?

Sutherland: It was an issue from the very beginning. It was an invention by Thomas Irving Potter, the younger Potter. He went on after Bayocean to be a very famous inventor. That’s what he came up with and it was the first in the nation and he tried to sell it to make some money to help with the construction of the Natatorium. But it just never worked right.

Miller: When was Bayocean’s heyday?

Sutherland: I would say 1915, that’s when everything that would be built had been. And it would have been a nice enough resort…

Miller: …even though that’s not really a huge selling point, ‘a nice enough resort.’

Sutherland: Yeah. Well, that’s why it didn’t. By 1915, they were in receivership because of a ton of court cases between them and others and lot owners that got a lot of bad press. Eventually they went into receivership and that was kind of the end of it but there were a couple of hotels, restaurants, dance halls. The Natatorium was a big attraction. So it was nice. It just wasn’t as grand.

The Hotel Bayocean, originally as promised, was going to be six stories high with 300 rooms. It was advertised to be like, at the time, the Hotel Del Monte - the biggest place along the Pacific Coast down in Monterey Bay. It was compared to that. That’s what disappointed people and started making them sue when that didn’t happen.

Miller: And then eventually, the original developers were forced out of their role and a judge put other folks in their place at that receivership.

Then in 1921, a group of Reed College students were put in charge of operating Bayocean Park. How did that happen?

Sutherland: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite stories of the Bayocean. The receivers…just couldn’t make it work. One of them, Lyman Latourette, a Portland assistant city attorney -- who pretty much ran the receivership -- was putting in his own money towards the end to keep it going and they didn’t have enough funds to do maintenance. So they somehow talked 25 Reed students into running the resort in 1921. They were led by John Van Etten. James Hamilton and James Gantenbein, in case anybody knows who they were…

Miller [Interjecting]: …or have been on the roads now named after them….

Sutherland: Yes. They built their own little dancehall down by the pier. Evidently, the one that was there was already gone. A fellow named George Haney set up a radio station and then he was on a telephone pole fixing it and fell, fractured his skull. A surgeon drove over from Portland and did such a good job that Haney changed his major from engineering to become a doctor. So it’s kind of a fun story.

Miller: But you note at one point it didn’t work. This experiment of having these ‘Reedies’,’ who weren’t getting paid, they were living there for free in return for running this resort... that if they couldn’t make this be profitable, 25 able-bodied people working for no pay, if they couldn’t do it then nobody could. What happened after that?

Sutherland: Well, that’s correct. Eventually, they actually tried another experiment with a thing called the Bayocean Military Academy in 1928. Now, this was after the receivership had ended and the resort was being controlled by something called the Tillamook Bay Ocean Company who were Tillamook locals and they set up something with this military academy that was supposed to have good prospects. A lot of boys out there, being trained and horse riding and various different things, but that fell apart.

So nothing really ever worked. Which is why that group, the TMO Bay Ocean Company eventually gave up and they just basically divvied up everything amongst themselves and called it quits.

Miller: There is also a commune that tried to make a go of it during the Great Depression. Can you tell us about that era of Bayocean’s history?

Sutherland: Yes. They were called the Artisans Cooperative Community and they showed up in 1934 and set up a little operation out of the Bayside Inn and caught fish, clams, crabs, et cetera, and sold them out in the Willamette Valley and did pretty well.

The leader, Lois Smith, was quite a firebrand. She was a really aggressive marketer and  talked to all the newspapers along a route and built the organization up to 49 people at one point. But they found that it wasn’t all that comfortable or quiet, hanging out in a motel with each other and people having to get up at different hours of the day because the tide changes. So there ended up being a lot of conflict and bickering amongst them. And she got help from Eleanor Roosevelt in setting up a grant from the federal government – WPA – to help with their operation but that then kicked in state officials who were not very supportive of self-help groups and federal funding. So they gave the artisans a hard time and eventually they left town.

Miller: Part of that massive swimming building, Natatorium, was destroyed by waves in 1932. 20 years before the total destruction of the town. But how much incremental damage was there over the next 20 years?

Sutherland: Well, it was just steady, it was really relentless. I’m sometimes surprised that after the Natatorium, 28 more homes were built because it was just a steady onslaught. Eventually, 30 houses slid into the sea.

Miller: Local residents blamed the Army Corps of Engineers at the time. Subsequent studies, as you note, by OSU geologists have confirmed that to a great extent, they were right. Can you explain the role that the Corps North Jetty played in the destruction of Bayocean?

Sutherland: In short, it interrupted the flow of sand up and down the Oregon Coast. At the time, they thought that it just went one direction and that jetties made no difference. But what Thomas Terich and Paul Komar figured out was that it did – that the sand is removed from Bayocean in the wintertime with strong storms coming from the southwest and the sand is basically moved north and up offshore. In the summer, lighter winds and slower wave action bring the sand slowly back onto shore and refill what had been taken. That North Jetty blocked that natural process so that the sand loss could never be replaced on Bayocean.

Miller: And you note that there’s a kind of irony here, if there hadn’t been sort of internal squabbles about this with different ports, and if two jetties had been constructed, that there’s a pretty good chance that all of that infrastructure, that Bayocean, would still be there today.

Sutherland: Yes, either two jetties or no jetties.

Miller: One was the problem. Zero or two, it would have been ok.

Sutherland: That’s correct that they would, yeah, everything would still be there.

Miller: At a time when Bayocean was clearly being reclaimed by the sea starting in the 1930s and going to the early 1950s, as you noted, people still built houses there and in the later part in the 1940s, it was becoming a kind of working class community. What was life like there before it was all washed away?

Sutherland: Well, some of the children who were there then are still alive and the stories they tell are wonderful. They just had a great time. The Natatorium ruins, the hotel ruins, everything that might seem bad to us was a playground for them. They just pretended they were Roman ruins and explored the area. They slid down the fresh sand erosion on cardboard and had as good a time as they might have on Mount Hood. They just really had a great time.

Miller: You immersed yourself in the history of Bayocean for years and talked to the last people who have memories of life there. What do you most wish that you had seen or experienced yourself?

Sutherland: I’d vote for a Natatorium. That must have been just a phenomenal place.

Miller: What were Bayocean’s end times like?

Sutherland: Well, it’s kind of surprising that even though it was a relentless onslaught of erosion, it sometimes let up for a few years. So people would be able to convince themselves it was gonna be alright. Some people decided they would probably lose their property, but they bought it anyway because it was cheap and wanted to enjoy it for a few years, as long as they could.

Miller: Jerry Sutherland. Thanks very much for joining us.

Sutherland: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Jerry Sutherland is a Portland-based author and historian. His new book is called “Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon.”

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