TILLAMOOK — Its location is rural. Its home, deceptively small. Even its mission is simple.  But belying the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum’s humble presence is a reach that extends from backyards to movie buffs to researchers drawn by resources as unexpected as beeswax on the beach.

Founded in 1935 by members of the Tillamook County Pioneer Association, the museum opened in the old county courthouse with about 400 donated objects — enough for a single display in a single room. Its mission then: to share the way of the settler’s life in 19^th-century Tillamook. Its mission today: still to preserve the story of the Tillamook way of life, but now with a collection of roughly 55,000 objects and 20,000 photographs and documents occupying three floors of the 125-year-old building and spanning the late 17^th through the 21^st centuries.

OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

Along with its scope and size, the staff’s expertise and the audience reached also have grown.

“We’ve been open for 90 years,” said Jenny Teece, museum exhibit and program developer. “Everybody has had their ideas and directions for the museum. In the past, directors and staff were trying to bring the world to Tillamook. Now, we like to say we’re bringing Tillamook to the world. We get such an amazing opportunity to showcase Tillamook County’s history to everyone who comes and visits us in our community.”

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Carmen Ripollés, an associate professor in art history at Portland State University, discovered the museum while researching the Santo Cristo De Burgos, shipwrecked off the Oregon Coast near Manzanita in 1693.

For decades, beachcombers and treasure hunters have found pieces of the ship’s cargo on north Oregon beaches. Finds of beeswax earned the ship its nickname, the Beeswax Wreck. Three years ago, state experts confirmed that timbers found by Tillamook commercial fisherman Craig Andes were from the ship.

“We realized that the museum has one of the largest collections of objects related to that shipwreck,” said Ripollés, who was born in Spain. “They have pieces of Chinese porcelain, which was one of the main cargos that was transported in these galleons, and they also have very large pieces of wax.”

Recently, Ripollés returned to the museum with a group of students who were able to handle some of the objects in the collection. “One of them is this arrowhead that is made of Chinese porcelain, and which was supposedly crafted by a Native person from something found from the wreck back in probably the 17th or 18th century,” Ripollés said. “The students loved it. They learned so much. The director and staff were very professional and enthusiastic.”

Jerry Sutherland, author of Bayocean, Atlantis of Oregon, turned to the museum when researching his book — in fact, he likely would not even have written it, if not for the museum. Although Sutherland hiked the area where the resort town of Bayocean, consumed by the sea starting in the 1920s, was located, he was unaware of its history until he read about the museum’s exhibit.

In his book, Sutherland writes that after reading the news story, he visited the museum, “…where the pictures of Bayocean had such a powerful impact that I recall their exhibit as the starting point of this journey.”

Researchers are drawn to the museum by the information housed in its old walls (research is by appointment and with certain fees), but visitors know the best reason to step inside the place is the exhibits.  And on a rainy day in Tillamook, the indoors is where most people want to be, but probably none more so than a parent.

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Some years ago, Leeauna Perry, now youth program director at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, taught music classes at the museum, often taking her young son along. Even though her son knew the place, when Perry needed a dry place to keep him occupied, they returned often.  

“When you’re a parent, especially a single parent with a small child, there aren’t very many interactive things that you can do in Tillamook that are low cost during the rainy days,” Perry said. “The museum was one of those things that we could afford to do and that would fill a whole day. There are so many different exhibits on each floor that you go in there and you don’t get bored. You take them through the whole museum, and they’re engaged the entire time.”

For Goonies fans, the museum is the place for an up-close connection to the film, which features a shipwreck/buried treasure plotline. “Because of the shipwrecked timbers found a couple of years ago, and especially with the Goonies 40^th celebration this year, we’ve had a lot of interest in the Beeswax shipwreck,” Teece said. “The tourists who’ve been coming this summer have been just fascinated by it. It’s one of those stories where the grandeur of ships, the shipwrecks, and that period of history kind of combines with the lore of the treasure and it becomes this mystical, fascinating story that just grabs everybody’s attention.”

Shipwrecks and treasure may typically be a hard attraction to top, but not when your names are Mac, Spike, and Zippy. The three canines are part of the Loyal Service exhibit, showcasing the stories of local veterans and the animals they worked with during active duty and after returning home.

“People love the pictures of the mascot dogs,” Teece said. “People really get a kick out of Spike, who was the Marine Detachment dog at the Naval Air Station, which is the Tillamook Air Museum now.  And people also love Zippy, the unofficial blimp squadron mascot dog. We also have on display a WWI veteran who was a big advocate for seeing-eye-dog programs in Oregon. His dog, Mac, was beloved by the community. When he had litters, it was in the newspaper. When the dog died, he had an obituary. He had cartoons made about him.” The exhibit opened in June and is scheduled through the end of the year.

But the story of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum does not end within its walls. In 2002, the Trust for Public Land donated 137 acres on Kilchis Point, a piece of land as rich in history as any in the county, to the museum. Once the site of one of the largest permanent Native American villages on the Northern Oregon Coast, it was also the place Tillamook County’s first white settler, Joe Champion, made his home — invited to do so by Chief Kilchis — and where the first ship, The Morning Star, was built.

The museum, which later added additional land to the gift, initially considered building a new facility on the site, but when that endeavor proved unfeasible, created the Kilchis Point Reserve.  The approximately 200-acre reserve features an accessible interpretive trail system with three branches, highlighting Flora and Fauna, Native American Heritage, and Pioneer Settlement. Boardwalks bridge delicate wetland areas, ending with the Caitlin Heusser Bird Watching Station, described as “an excellent place to take in the southern end of Tillamook Bay, Cape Meares, and the multitude of birds visible there, including several regular rookeries for egrets and herons.”

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Perry, who once taught music inside the museum, leads youth groups on hikes sponsored by Sitka through the reserve. “The museum is a true cultural hub,” Perry said. “They provide a space that goes beyond just expressing our local or regional history. They provide different types of cultural opportunities, from exploring outdoor spaces to exploring historic-like relics in their collections…. They have a really community-centric lens that they use when they’re making decisions on how to serve the community.”