Very few people outside Coos County, and probably not that many inside it, know what a big deal Coos Bay is. It’s the biggest deepwater harbor on the Northwest coast — that is, between San Francisco and Puget Sound. And it’s far safer than Portland or Astoria, tucked as they are behind the “Graveyard of the Pacific” at the mouth of the Columbia. So, one has to wonder why it had no railroad connection to the outside world until 1916 — more than 30 years after Portland got one. There have to have been some theories and speculations about that among the residents and business leaders in the towns ..read more

Bride of Christ cult sought perfect righeousness, Christ-like simplicity and total humility. In practice, though, it spawned nothing but misery and madness, and a legal precedent for “honor killings.” (Waldport, Lincoln County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1106a-bride-of-christ-holy-rollers-in-corvallis-ending.html ..read more

Preacher Edmund Creffield's Bride of Christ Church broke up families, sanctioned adultery and inspired deadly violence in the early 20th Century. Ironically, its practitioners' goal was perfect holiness and godliness. (Corvallis, Benton County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1105e-bride-of-christ-holy-rollers-in-corvallis-beginning.html ..read more

Young Henry Miller, rejected by his illustrious father, turned to a life of crime, but he turned out not to be very good at it. For his part, the ever-classy Joaquin took to claiming Harry was not really his son. (Coquille, Coos County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1507b.black-sheep-of-joaquin-miller-family.347.html ..read more

WPA writer Sara B. Wrenn's oral history interview with Mrs. J.R. Bean, and some excerpts from the reminiscences of one of her in-laws, James Meikle Sharp, who crossed the country on an Oregon Trail wagon train and secured a teacher's certificate in his new Oregon home. (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001963 ..read more

Abraham Coryell Edmunds, throughout his several careers in Oregon and California, was almost like a cartoon — a larger-than-life loser in the vein of Wile E. Coyote, with a little Carrie Nation mixed in along with a whole lot of Don Quixote. Nor were his “own-goals” minor affairs. A.C. Edmunds was almost singlehandedly responsible for the demise of the early Universalist Church in California, the temporary collapse of the Universalist congregation in Portland, and for the sudden death of the temperance and women’s suffrage movements in Oregon in 1874. Before he got involved, Oregon was on trac ..read more

Oregon went 'dry' in 1914, so by the time the Volstead Act passed in 1919, Beaver State bootleggers were already seasoned professionals. So when the rest of the West Coast needed them, Oregon's 'midnight entrepreneurs' were ready to roll. (Statewide; 1910s, 1920s, 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1308a-rumrunners-moonshiners-and-speakeasies.html ..read more

A small construction engine was being used to build the South Jetty, to protect the mouth of the Columbia River for ships, when one off-course four-masted schooner crashed into it — so construction crews chugged to the rescue. (Hammond, Clatsop County; 1910s; Offbeat Oregon History column by Finn J.D. John, 15 May 2011) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1105c-railroad-train-rescues-shipwrecked-schooners-crew.html ..read more

This is the third and final part of WPA writer William Haight's oral history interview with Mrs. Neil Niven (Haight doesn't give us her first name or maiden name). Mrs. Niven came to the wild Oregon hard-rock mining boomtown of Granite as a schoolteacher, later served as its newspaper's editor, and throughout her time there she was a close and occasionally sarcastic observer of its wild, violent, rootin'-tootin' culture. (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001942 ..read more

The railroad, the local police agencies, and the U.S. War Department all desperately wanted to prosecute somebody, anybody, just not the young Marine who almost certainly was young Martha Brinson James' actual killer. (Albany, Linn County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1607b.war-bride-murder-3.399.html ..read more