Soggy, primitive Hug Point Road may have saved Oregon beaches

Sometime around 1908, a resident of south Clatsop County — probably from the hamlet of Arch Cape — got sick and tired of dealing with Hug Point, and decided to do something about it.

It was a decision that had some unintended consequences — because it led directly to the law that made Oregon’s beaches public property.

Of course, the anonymous roadbuilder (or maybe roadbuilders) wasn’t thinking of anything so grandiose at the time. He was simply tired of having to wait for low tide and then wade into the surf, or drive his team into the surf, to get from Arch Cape to Cannon Beach.

And yes, everyone used the beach to get back and forth, from Arch Cape to Cannon Beach and from Seaside to Astoria. In most cases there were no other roads. Inland, especially in the south part of the county, road building was very difficult and expensive, because of thick forests and steep rocky terrain; so everyone used the beach to get from place to place. And Hug Point, well, it was just really inconveniently located, sticking out across the whole beach and towering several hundred feet high.

So this person, with hammer and cold chisel and probably no small amount of dynamite, chipped and blasted a roadbed through its face.

Now, even in very stormy weather with a high and boisterous surf, the mail could get through; travelers could get home without getting their feet wet (usually); and owners of those newfangled horseless carriages ran much less risk of getting stuck in the sand with the tide coming in to ruin their cars.

The custom of using the beach to travel had developed right from the beginning in Clatsop County, and, after some beachfront landowners had tried to block free access up and down the beach in the 1890s, the state Legislature had actually passed a law making Clatsop County’s beaches public highways.

It wasn’t really a controversial move. It only affected the one county, and everyone who lived in that county (except one or two landowners) recognized the importance of being able to walk or ride up and down the beach unmolested. Legislators from other counties were happy to give Clatsop what it wanted, and residents of places like Arch Cape no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when it passed.

More importantly, though, that law meant that our road-building benefactor, while blasting the road through Hug Point, could rest assured that wasn’t going to have to deal with some angry putative landowner ordering him off “his property,” or that his act of civic generosity would immediately be seized by a landowner eager to reap where he had not sowed by charging a toll to use it, despite having done none of the work on it. Or, worse, simply exclude the public from using it.

No — thanks to the law, the citizen was free to solve the problem for everyone, and the whole community benefited.

And, as a side benefit, every Clatsop County resident was free to come to the beach, play in the surf, have a picnic, and admire the scenery, whether they owned beachfront property or not.

So, there things stood, for a few years, with residents of Arch Cape gratefully crossing Hug Point on the newly blasted roadbed, doubtless glancing occasionally at the tossing surf and murmuring a quick word of thanks that they didn’t have to plunge into it like they did back in the older times.

Then came the elections of 1912, and Oregon elected Democrat Oswald West as governor.

West was elected, in part, on a promise to preserve Oregon beaches for public use, rather than letting them be carved up in land claims by private owners. It was a fight that Clatsop County had already had, as West well knew. Now, he thought, it was time to stand on the shoulders of those giants, and use their plan to preserve the rest of the state’s beaches.

It’s crystal clear that West wasn’t nearly as interested in the beaches’ potential as highways, as he was in the scenic beauty and recreational potential.

But there was also an element of the range-warrior spirit about the stand he was taking. Property owners’ claims that they should be allowed to convert the publicly owned beaches into private property were, so to speak, a new stanza of an old familiar song for West. He had grown up watching swindlers and corporations poaching giant blocks of state-owned land (some of it very valuable and scenic) through land-grant swindles and fake-homesteader hustles, with the help of friendly politicians in Salem. He had built his reputation stopping the same crafty characters from actively stealing state-owned school lands.

He saw the Oregon beaches as the next step in this public-land-conversion racket, and he really wanted to stop it.

There was a difference, though. Landowners on the coast weren’t stealing anything — they had legitimate legal land claims on beachfront property. Legally there was nothing (yet) to stop them from blocking public access, and thereby cutting off any neighbors who used the beach to reach the outside world, except for a waterfront version of “range custom” — except in Clatsop County, where it was now the law of the land.

There was another factor West was thinking about, too. That was the Good Roads Movement. It had acquired a great deal of momentum in Oregon, as wealthier residents had started purchasing automobiles and were finding them very difficult to use on the rutty, stumpy, muddy tracks that passed for roads throughout most of the state.

Nearly everyone in the state was all in favor of good roads. By 1912, most Oregonians were also all too aware of the benefits that had come from Samuel Lancaster’s work up in Washington following Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition three years earlier. In the early 1910s, when it came to good roads, it really was true that “if you build it they will come.” And everyone knew it.

For Oregon to grow its economy into the 20th century, it would need a good solid network of roads suitable for use by driven-wheel vehicles (bicycles, cars, etc .; things that required traction to go) as well as horse-drawn ones.

So Oswald West brought these two constituencies together in his proposal to extend Clatsop County’s road law all the way south to California.

“I pointed out that thus we would come into miles and miles of highway without cost to the taxpayer,” he recalled, in a 1949 interview. “The Legislature and the public took the bait — hook, line, and sinker.”

So, the question of the day is — would that have worked had the public (or, rather, the most politically active parts of it) not seen with their own eyes how well the beach-highway law was serving Clatsop County?

Speaking for myself, I doubt it.

A canny politican, West could see that he would have two main sources of resistance to his plan: Landowners to the south, and libertarian-leaning plutocrats who felt that government should meddle as little as possible in other people’s property interests.

As West well knew, he could do nothing to counter resistance from landowners with beachfront property to the south. But in 1912, partly because it was so hard to reach those places, there just weren’t very many of them. Other than settlements at the mouths of major rivers and bays, like Tillamook and Newport and Marshfield, the Oregon coast was almost a wilderness area.

As for the libertarian plutocrats, well ... most of those, living in the Portland and Salem areas, had at least once vacationed in Clatsop County and benefitted personally from having a legal right to access the beaches there.

And at Hug Point, the hand-cut roadbed became Exhibit A in the case for beach-as-highway. Would the anonymous benefactor have invested the time and dynamite to make that road if he hadn’t had the protection of the law? Of course not.

So when West came before the Legislature to make the case that the state should claim a right of passage all along the beach, defined as the strip of wet sand between the low and the high tide marks — he got very little resistance indeed.

To be sure, the landowners with beachfront property were mostly defiant. But, as noted, there just weren’t very many of them, and that actually had a lot to do with the problem the beach-highway scheme would directly address: there was no way to access their property.

The law was passed, duly signed into law in 1913 ... and the rest is history.

But the whole debate might have gone down in flames if it had not been for Clatsop County — and the anonymous benefactor who blasted that road into the side of Hug Point.

(Sources: “US 101 (Oregon Coast Highway),” an article by Robert W. Hadlow published Aug. 11, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia; “Oregon owes its public beaches to a decision by Oswald West 100 years ago,” an article by Lori Tobias published in the Feb. 13, 2013, issue of The Portland Oregonian; “Law protecting Oregon beaches enacted 110 years ago,” an article by Bob Atiyeh published in the Feb. 12, 2023, issue of the Cannon Beach Gazette; In Search of Western Oregon, a book by Ralph Friedman published in 1978 by Caxton Press)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.