Lewis and Clark Salt Works
Lewis and Clark Way at Beach Drive
Seaside, OR
A small circle of blackened stones a few steps from the beach, where five men of the Corps of Discovery spent a soggy winter boiling the Pacific down into salt for the long walk home.
By the winter of 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition had crossed a continent and reached the Pacific, and it was nearly out of one humble but essential supply: salt. They needed it to season their food and, above all, to preserve meat for the two-thousand-mile walk back east. So the captains sent a small party down the coast to make some, the only way they could, by boiling the ocean.
What is left of that camp is easy to miss: a low circle of fire-blackened stones set behind a fence in a Seaside neighborhood, a few steps from the beach. It is modest to the point of being humble. But this is the spot, or as near as anyone has been able to fix it, where the Corps of Discovery reached the sea's edge and turned salt water into the salt that carried them home.
What Guests Love
- Standing on the exact stretch of coast where the expedition ended its long push to the sea
- The oddness of a two-hundred-year-old landmark tucked between beach cottages, free and always open
- Pairing it with the Promenade and the beach a block away for a full morning of Seaside history
- Walking the salt trail idea in reverse, connecting it in your mind to Fort Clatsop up the coast
Worth Knowing
- This is a small, quiet monument, a reconstructed rock cairn behind a low fence, not a big attraction; the reward is the history and the setting, not the size
- It is a National Park Service site, free and open at all hours, on a residential street, so be considerate of the neighbors
- Pair it with Fort Clatsop, a short drive north, to see both ends of the expedition's winter
- There is little parking right at the site, so it is easiest to walk over from the beachfront
Details
Seaside, OR
Learn about Lewis and Clark Salt Works
Worth their salt
From their winter quarters at Fort Clatsop, the expedition sent out a detachment in late December 1805 to find a good place to make salt. On the first day of 1806 the men settled on this beach, close to fresh water and driftwood for fuel and to Native villages that could help feed them. They built a furnace of stones set with five kettles and got to work.
It was miserable, patient labor. For roughly seven weeks a rotating crew gathered seawater, let it settle, and kept it boiling day and night through the cold coastal rain, cooking off the water until only salt remained. Three men, Joseph Field, William Bratton, and George Gibson, did most of the tending. By the time they broke camp on February 20, 1806, they had produced about three and a half bushels of salt, which Captain Lewis pronounced excellent, fine, strong, and white.
In Clatsop country
The saltmakers did not survive that winter alone. They were guests in the homeland of the Clatsop people and their coastal neighbors, who lived along these estuaries and beaches, and who traded food and knowledge with the newcomers throughout the expedition's stay. The camp on the beach existed at the sufferance and with the help of the people who had lived here for countless generations.
That connection is also how the site was remembered. The precise spot might have been lost for good, except that a Clatsop woman named Jenny Michel, born in 1816, carried the knowledge of where the salt cairn had stood, and her testimony, together with the old rockpile itself, is what let later generations mark the place. The Clatsop and their descendants are still part of this coast, not a closed chapter of it.
Lost and found again
After the expedition left, the salt works was forgotten for the better part of a century, its stones settling into the sand as Seaside grew up around it. In 1900 the Oregon Historical Society reestablished the site, guided by Jenny Michel's account and the surviving pile of rocks, and reconstructed the low stone cairn you see today.
It is now part of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, whose pieces are scattered around the mouth of the Columbia. A ranger sometimes appears in period dress in summer, but most of the year it is just the cairn, the fence, and the sound of the surf a block away, which is somehow fitting for a place that was always more about grit than grandeur.
Making a visit of it
Set your expectations right and the salt works is a small delight. It takes only a few minutes to see, so the move is to walk over from the beachfront, read the marker, and let the imagination do the rest: five soaked men, a smoking furnace, and the endless gray Pacific that had been their goal.
Then make a loop of the history. Fort Clatsop, a short drive north, is the reconstructed fort where the expedition spent that rainy winter, linked to this beach by the old salt trail the men walked. Seaside itself marks the western terminus of the Lewis and Clark Trail, with a statue of the captains at the beachfront turnaround, so a single morning can trace the very end of their journey to the sea.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Seaside
Seaside Promenade and Beach
A block west
A mile and a half of oceanfront boardwalk ending at the turnaround, where a statue marks the western end of the Lewis and Clark Trail.
Fort Clatsop
About 12 miles north
The reconstructed log fort of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, where the Corps of Discovery waited out the winter of 1806.
Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock
About 12 miles south
One of the most famous stretches of the Oregon coast, anchored by the towering sea stack of Haystack Rock and its tidepools.