The Columbia River Maritime Museum had a problem. Two warehouses, totaling just under 26,000 square feet, near bursting with priceless maritime history – and no place to share it.

“We love that we have two full warehouses,” the museum’s executive director, Bruce Jones, said. “And we hate the fact the public doesn’t get to see them.”

This fall, the Astoria museum will move one step closer to fixing the problem when it breaks ground on a $30 million expansion, the largest in the museum’s history.

“It’s the biggest transformation in our history since the museum building opened in 1982,” Jones said. “It’s just going to be a tremendous transformative change to our business. This is going to make it as good as any maritime building in the U.S.”

At present, the museum’s 13-acre campus features a 44-foot motor lifeboat, the authentic bridge of a World War II destroyer, the floating lightship Columbia, a model sailboat pond, and 3D theater, among other exhibits.

The expansion will include a 24,500-square-foot Mariners Hall, new exhibits, and renovated exhibit spaces, allowing the museum to broaden its role not only as a keeper of maritime culture, but as a valued educator, tourist destination, and research resource used by people from all over the world.

“People tell us that the Columbia River Maritime Museum is so different from every other maritime museum they have visited,” Jones said. “It’s not your grandfather’s maritime museum.”

Blessed with an abundance of maritime artifacts — all donated — the museum has long struggled with a need for space.  In 2020, after two large, important historic boats became available, the problem could no longer be ignored. There was talk of an addition, but it was only in 2021 when a trustee made what Jones called an “unexpected, very generous $5 million donation” that the conversation got real. In 2023, the board approved the $30 million project.

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

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One of the historic boats spawning the growth is the 45-foot Merrimac yacht, a gift from Karen and John Fettig.  Originally a kit ordered from Michigan to be assembled in Portland, the yacht eventually made its way to Astoria boat builder Joe Dyer, who put his own touches on the design and launched it in 1938. The Merrimac was dubbed the “Million Dollar Yacht … because of her quality craftsmanship, innovation and features such as a shower in the bow, leaded glass bookcases and original fixtures,” according to the Classic Yacht Register.

The second boat is the Triumph II, one of four 52-foot steel-hulled U.S. Coast Guard motor lifeboats built specifically for the Pacific Northwest. Jones said the museum has begun the process to secure the Triumph II – stationed at nearby Cape Disappointment – for a long-term education loan.

Those are just two boats in the considerable inventory Jones plans to put on exhibit when the expansion is complete. They’ll join exhibits already in place, including three fishing boats, an ocean rowboat used to cross the Pacific, an old bar pilot rowboat, and 44-foot and 36-foot motor lifeboats. Others in storage include a “log bronc” used to work logs in the river; a salmon tender built in 1902 in Astoria by the Wilson Brothers; a George Pocock 60-foot racing shell; a lifeboat from a WWII Liberty ship, built in 1944 by Gunderson Marine in Portland; an Axtell racer; a Pacific City dory boat; and a Tollycraft.

That’s a sampling of the boat warehouse. A second warehouse safeguards paintings, prints, records, engines, figureheads, nameboards dating back to the early 1800s, “and all kinds of nautical equipment, most of it irreplaceable,” Jones said. “We’re bringing out as much as we can. One of the concepts of the design of Mariners Hall is a bulkhead that goes the length of the building, east and west, and will be filled with tons of objects. Those things can be swapped out. We’ll be able to keep it fresh.”

The expansion will not only open exhibit space but also, for the first time, give the museum a purpose-built classroom to serve its active education program. The program has been “bounced from room to room, depending on what room is available that day,” Jones said. “We’re actually building a classroom that’s designed to be a classroom.”          

Classes also are held outside the museum in schools, senior centers, public libraries, and online.

In school programs, students learn about the life of a shark through dissections and get a lesson in the mariner’s pastime of scrimshaw. But the most popular is the miniboat workshop, said Heidi Lent, STEAM teacher at Warrenton Middle School. In partnership with sister schools in Japan, students receive 10 weekly lessons that include building a miniboat that is then christened – “with much pomp and circumstance” — launched and tracked over the next two years with GPS.

The workshop, introduced by Nate Sandel, former museum director of education, is a lesson both in boat building and in Japanese culture, Lent said. “We would launch the boats from both sides of the Pacific and watch them via GPS to see if they crossed the Pacific.”

“For Nate, it was also about bringing in the culture of Japan: What kids do, what they eat, how their schools are,” she said, noting that he visited the school once a week. “The way the kids reacted, this was the best day of the week for them.”

While programs at the schools give students a taste of life at sea, senior enrichment programs center on the museum’s untold stories brought to life by artifacts from the museum.  

“It’s really unusual in the museum world to be able to take things off site,” said the museum’s education coordinator, Julia Triezenberg. “Some artifacts are too fragile to go off site, and we always chose things that are sturdy enough, so we are not going to damage them.”

Topics have included the history of the Oregon Coast railroad, Pacific Northwest weather, shanghaiing, the USS Shark shipwreck, maritime slang, and even ashtrays, the once popular marketing tool of everything from boat builders to railroads.

“I think the most rewarding part of our visits is we see the same folks month to month, Triezenberg said. “They share little tidbits with us. Having such a diverse range of things we talk about, there’s always an opportunity for people to share something different, a new little tidbit that we wouldn’t have found out about any other way. I think we learn just as much, if not more, from them as they do from our research.”

Even as the museum readies for groundbreaking on the expansion, curators are busy creating two new exhibits, one on the Chinook Indian Nation, set to open in September, the other, the Cedar and Sea Exhibit, showcasing Indigenous people from Yakutat, Alaska, to Southern Oregon.  

The exhibit on the Chinook Nation will feature work by documentary photographer Amiran White; a welcoming video with Tony Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation; and a display of two large Chinook canoes.

“We think the Chinook story should always be centered in the way museums in our territory talk about the history of the place,” said Johnson. “We have a very long and important history with the Columbia River Maritime Museum and, I think, appropriately so. For us, the most important story is for non-Native folks who live on our land. We want people to see our place through our teachings and our eyes, because, again, we think that’s where the brightest future lies.”

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the museum is as integral to the Astoria community as the river that runs by it, which is one of the reasons Suzi Regan, a museum volunteer and group visits coordinator, makes sure volunteers go on their own educational field trips.

“We have an outing every month,” said Regan. “We know that our volunteers interact with guests not just telling the story of museum, but our guests like to know a lot of things. So, the more our volunteers know about the history of the community, the more it makes them a better docent, better volunteers. It’s also a way to inspire lifelong learning, which, as an educator, I am a huge fan of.”

And that brings us to what may be one of the best kept secrets of Astoria, but is familiar to researchers, writers, artists, hobbyists, and genealogists from around the globe: the museum’s vast maritime reference library, where they can find everything from historic photos to a good story about man’s four-legged friend.

Among the Ted M. Natt Maritime Library’s holdings are Capt. James Cook‘s journals, an original ship log from the 1770s fur-trade era, and Columbia River bar pilot logs dating back to 1918. The library also houses original copies of Lloyd’s Register of Ships — the official record of commercial ships – dating from 1889, a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the crew room on the USS Oregon, and 3,189 photos from the Columbia River Packers Association, which eventually became Bumble Bee.

One recent request for information involved the ship mascot on the 1881 Lupatia shipwreck near Tillamook Rock. An Australian shepherd mix that swam to shore was the sole survivor.

“They wanted to know whether it was adopted by the crew of the Tillamook lighthouse and what its name may have been,” said librarian Marcy Dunning.

Her research revealed that a rescue party found the pup shivering on the beach the next morning, its eyes swollen from salt water. “The dog lucked out a second time when he was adopted by a friend of the ship’s captain who lived in Astoria,” Dunning said.

“According to Jim Gibbs, who served as a lighthouse keeper on Tillamook Rock, the tale of the rescued dog was one he heard many times from retired keepers,” Dunning added.

Gibbs shares the tale in Pacific Graveyard, which is also in the library’s collection. Dunning still hopes to hear from someone who knows the names of the dog and the person who adopted it. There’s a good chance she will.

“We get requests from all over the world. The questions are always different. The  patrons are really fun to deal with. We are considered one of the best maritime libraries on the West Coast,” Dunning said. “I think it’s one of the better ones in the U.S.”