Clatsop County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Clatsop County

John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company established Fort Astoria on the south bank of the Columbia River in April 1811 — making Astoria the oldest continuously occupied non-Indigenous settlement west of the Rocky Mountains by a margin of several decades. The fort was sold under duress to the British North West Company in 1813 during the War of 1812, reverted to American control by 1818 treaty, and the town that grew around it absorbed the Lewis & Clark Expedition's prior Fort Clatsop winter encampment (1805-06) into a single integrated Lewis and Clark National Historical Park — the only NPS unit that interprets both the inbound and outbound Pacific termini of the expedition. The 125-ft Astoria Column on Coxcomb Hill (1926) holds the only fully-painted exterior frieze depicting the entire Lewis & Clark Expedition route, executed in sgraffito relief by Italian-born artist Attilio Pusterla; visitors climb 164 spiral stairs to a viewing platform that commands the Columbia River mouth, the Astoria-Megler Bridge to Washington (the longest continuous truss bridge in North America at 4.1 miles), and the Pacific Ocean.

Fort Stevens State Park 10 miles west at the river's mouth holds the largest state-park RV-friendly campground in Oregon — 170+ full-hookup sites in addition to 300+ electric-only sites accepting rigs to 60 ft, on year-round reservation through Oregon State Parks 9 months ahead — and the wreck of the Peter Iredale (a four-masted British steel barque that grounded in fog on 25 October 1906; the surviving bow and forward hull section remain visible at low tide on the park beach). The Columbia River Bar at the river mouth is one of the most dangerous bar crossings in the world (the 'Graveyard of the Pacific'); 2,000+ recorded shipwrecks since 1792 per Columbia River Maritime Museum records. US-101 crosses Clatsop County via the Astoria-Megler Bridge for the Washington-coast connection.