Forists and Green Verdent Launs: The Oregon Coast
The Oregon coast is a sliver of land between the mountains and the sea, a land of mild temperatures, lush vegetation, and abundant terrestrial and sea life. Forists and Green Verdent Launs: the Story of the Oregon Coast examines the interplay of natural history and human actions on the Oregon coast from the beginning of human settlement to modern times. Gail Wells writes articles and essays about science, history, natural resources, and other subjects for technical and popular publications. She is the author of The Tillamook: A Created Forest Comes of Age, and coauthor with Dawn Anzinger of Lewis and Clark Meet Oregon's Forests: Lessons from Dynamic Nature. She speaks frequently on natural resource history for Oregon Chautauqua, a program of the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Although she now lives in Corvallis, she is a frequent visitor to the coast, which she knows and loves well.">
compiled by Gail Wells
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Introduction
The history of the Oregon coast is a story about the interplay between a rugged landscape and human actions. Its history since European American settlement has in many ways paralleled the history of the Pacific Northwest as a whole, but the coast’s isolating topography, the early and lasting imprint of the federal government, persistent Indian-white conflicts, and complicated cultural attitudes make the coast’s story unique.
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Contact and Settlement
The Pacific coast was one of the last areas of the continent to be contacted by European Americans, and the subsequent colonization was swift and thorough. European settlement of the Oregon coast brought a wrenching transformation to its Native peoples.
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Development of the Coastal Economy
Early commercial ventures along the Oregon coast centered around ships, timber, coal, fish, and farm crops. The coast’s abundant natural resources set it on a pathway toward becoming a raw resource provider to outside markets.
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Capital, Transportation, and Technology Transform the Economy
Railroads began to connect the coast with the interior of the state in the late nineteenth century. Timber, a foundation of the coastal economy, became a highly capitalized, technology-heavy big business. Increasing economic development along the coast prompted successful attempts to take back reservation lands from the Indians. Later, the Oregon Coast Highway linked towns with one another and made the coast attractive and accessible to vacationers.
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Unions and Hard Times between the Wars
In the first decades of the twentieth century, unions began to organize in earnest, provoking often-violent confrontations between unions and companies and sometimes between rival unions. The gloomy economic prospects immediately after World War I dampened people’s outlook and encouraged a narrow nativist attitude. The good times of the 1920s ended abruptly with the Great Depression. World War II brought war industries to the Northwest and boosted the coastal economy.
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The Oregon Coast in Modern Times
Prosperity came suddenly to the coast in the wake of World War II as sawmills churned out lumber for a housing boom in southern California. The good times lasted for almost a generation. Then in the 1970s, environmental concerns and instability in the timber industry ushered in hard times for coastal towns. The area’s natural beauty endures, however, and it is propelling tourism to dominance in the coastal economy.
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