Oysterville
Territory Rd
Oysterville, WA
A hushed village of weathered Victorian houses at the north end of the Long Beach Peninsula, where a booming 1850s oyster port simply stopped growing and stayed beautiful.
Oysterville is a small, astonishingly intact 1850s village at the north tip of the Long Beach Peninsula, strung along the shore of Willapa Bay. Its lanes are lined with weathered Victorian houses, a white clapboard church, and a one-room schoolhouse, and the whole town is a National Register historic district, placed on the register in 1976.
The reason it survives so complete is a kind of beautiful accident. Oysterville boomed on the native oysters of the bay, then declined when the oysters gave out and the county seat was famously spirited away in the night, and the town never boomed again to tear its old buildings down. What is left is a rare, quiet window into a Northwest boomtown that outlived its boom.
What Guests Love
- Wandering a whole village of preserved 1860s to 1880s homes on a self-guided walk
- The simple white 1892 church and the one-room schoolhouse
- Buying oysters and shellfish raised in the bay right where the industry began
- The deep quiet of a place that time, and the loss of the county seat, left behind
Worth Knowing
- It is a living residential village, so admire the historic homes from the road and respect that people live in them
- There are no big services here; stock up in Ocean Park or Long Beach to the south
- Willapa Bay tides run far out and back fast, and the mudflats are not for casual wading
- A free self-guided walking tour brochure keys the historic buildings to their stories
Details
Oysterville, WA
Learn about Oysterville
Oysters, and the town they built
The Chinook people had gathered the small, sweet native oysters of Willapa Bay, then called Shoalwater Bay, for generations before newcomers arrived. In 1854 settlers Robert Espy and Isaac Clark were guided to the richest oyster beds by a Native man remembered as Nahcotta, and they founded a town on the spot to harvest and ship the shellfish.
What followed was a genuine gold rush in oysters. Schooners carried the harvest south to a hungry San Francisco during the California boom, and for a stretch in the late 1850s the great majority of the oysters eaten in that city came from this one bay. Oysterville's population climbed to somewhere near nine hundred at its 1870s peak, and its founders grew rich.
The town that stopped
The boom did not last. Decades of hard harvesting thinned the native oyster beds, the shipping trade faltered, and the town's fortunes slid. The final blow to its status came in 1893, when, by local account, a party from the rival town of South Bend crossed the bay and carried off the county records in the night, moving the county seat away from Oysterville for good.
Left without its industry or its official importance, Oysterville simply grew still. Its houses were not replaced by anything bigger, its church and school were kept up rather than torn down, and the village settled into a long, well-preserved quiet that turned out to be its greatest gift to the future.
Walking the village today
Today Oysterville is a walkable open-air museum that people still live in. A self-guided tour brochure leads you past the founders' homes, the trim 1892 church that hosts summer music, the old schoolhouse, and the shady grove of the pioneer cemetery, each with its own story of the oyster years.
The oyster trade never fully vanished, either. Cultivated oysters and other shellfish are still raised in the bay and sold near the water, so you can taste the very thing the town was built on. The pace is slow, the light off the bay is soft, and the whole place rewards an unhurried afternoon.
Willapa Bay and the peninsula
Oysterville sits on the sheltered inner shore of Willapa Bay, widely regarded as one of the cleanest large estuaries in the country and a powerhouse of oyster and shellfish farming. The bay's tides move a lot of water across broad mudflats, feeding huge numbers of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl.
The rest of the Long Beach Peninsula unrolls to the south: a nearly unbroken ribbon of Pacific sand famous for kite flying, razor clamming, and long beach drives, with the small towns of Ocean Park and Long Beach offering the services this old village deliberately lacks.
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 Long Beach Peninsula
Willapa Bay oyster farms
Along the bay
Working shellfish farms and roadside stands where the oysters, clams, and other shellfish of one of the country's cleanest estuaries are raised and sold fresh.
Long Beach
About 12 miles south
The peninsula's main town, with a boardwalk over the dunes, the World Kite Museum, and access to miles of hard-packed beach open to walking, clamming, and driving.
Cape Disappointment State Park
About 20 miles south
Two historic lighthouses, Fort Canby's gun batteries, and the mouth of the Columbia where Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific, at the peninsula's southern tip.