Oysterville

Long before settlers arrived, the Chinook people set up camps on the shore of Shoalwater Bay, where they harvested oysters from its shallows. It was an elder known as Old Klickeas who showed the bay's bounty to two young men, Robert Hamilton Espy and Isaac Alonzo Clark, and that meeting set off the first wave of settlement on the site of present-day Oysterville.

Demand for the shellfish in San Francisco, where a single plate could fetch $50, drew hundreds of newcomers within a few months. In 1855 the village was named the county seat of Pacific County in Washington Territory. It built a school, a college, a newspaper, a post office and a church, yet it never had a bank. Schooners sailed in to load oysters, and the men who sold their catch were paid in gold coin, which many tucked away in buried caches or beneath floorboards. At one point Oysterville held more gold than any other town on the West Coast apart from San Francisco.

Today the village's quiet lanes and waterfront views give little hint of its rowdy early days. Oysterville was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.