Back to News Index

Thursday, August 11, 2005

By Katy Muldoon

Astoria--Floyd Holcom pulls at a stubborn, weatherworn door. He slides the panel open along a rusty track and steps into a dark room that smells of salt and timber and time.

Soon, this corner of Pier 39, built in 1875 and Astoria's lone remaining historic fish cannery, will transform into the most modern of storefronts: a sales office for an upscale, 93-unit condominium project--the Cannery Lofts--due to break ground this month.

Pier 39, the condos and other developments rising along a downtown waterfront once squirming with 18 canneries are evidence that this city of 10,000 on Oregon's northwestern tip is crafting a future powerfully linked to its piscatorial past.

"Anybody can develop," says Holcom, a 41-year-old Astoria native--a dark-haired fellow both round and sturdy, not unlike the pilings that support the cannery he's renovating. "But Astoria is the oldest American city west of the Rockies. We have more history than any Oregon town....We need development based on our history."

Pier 39, the hodgepodge of 10 connected cannery buildings Holcom bought in 2002, complete with the original, clear vertical-grain, old-growth timbers and beefy wide-plank flooring, provides the eastern bookend to the changes coming Astoria's way.

On the pier's southwest corner, Newport-based Rogue Ales is building a brewpub one floor below spaces Holcom has renovated into riverfront offices and swanky vacation suites. In another spacious, dimly lit, first floor room, he envisions a seafood restaurant.

On the southeast side, where compressors once filled walk-in freezers with enough coolant to keep thousands of tuna on ice, he'll install museum displays that herald Astoria's past as the world's cannery capital.

And on the dry side of the dock leading to Pier 39, Holcom plans a park honoring the unsung work force--the women who held most of the cannery jobs and kept the places humming for the better part of a century. He and others will dedicate the park Saturday, when generations of cannery and cold-storage workers gather for a reunion at Pier 39.

Closer to Astoria's city center, hammers and nail guns signal the rise of Mill Pond Village, an 86-lot subdivision designed to resemble a vintage fishing burg.

And at the town's western edge, the luxurious, 46-room Cannery Pier Hotel, due to open this month on another old cannery site--and built to look like one--still smells of drying paint and carpet glue.

Which, by all accounts, is easier on the nose than the days when salmon and Dungeness crab piled high in the warehouses and when Astoria was nicknamed Tuna Town for good reason.

When the famous Columbia River salmon ran thick in the 1940s, Mae Wheeler recalls, days in the canneries started at 7 a.m. and might not end until midnight.

Like others on the fish packing line, Wheeler stood for all those hours, sharp cleaver in hand, atop a wood grate over a perennially web concrete floor.

The salmon steaks arriving on a conveyor belt were bigger than a roast beef, a testament to the 60- or 70-pound salmon that seem like exaggerated fish stories by today's standards.

Eventually, cans with colorful labels touting "Fancy Chinook Salmon" and "Gill Netters Best" landed in such faraway places as New York and London.

Wheeler still lives in Astoria. When she talks about those days, working to feed her family and put her daughter through college, her slender, manicured hands chop the air as if they were cleavers themselves. Wheeler's cheeks, at 98 years old, remain pink and nearly unlined. And her stories spill out sprinkled with such clear detail that you can almost see downtown's sidewalks bustling with cannery ladies, as they were called, dressed in their white-belted jumpsuits and white rubber boots, their hair wrapped up in white bandanas.

Wheeler had five monogrammed uniforms, so she could wear a freshly laundered one each day. When she got home from shifts that paid "a dollar something" an hour, she recalls, she'd undress in the garage--particularly during tuna packing season, when the fish stink on her clothes was unfit for the indoors. Washing in lemon or vinegar excised the smell from her skin.

She didn't mind the work.

"The fish," she says, "is what kept Astoria going."

Astoria, founded in 1811, always has been the kind of town where hard work is as expected as rain. If it wasn't canning, it was seining or gill netting, logging or chopping firewood.

Native people had harvested salmon near the Columbia's mouth for thousands of years by the time canneries arrived in 1866.

By 1882, so many salmon swam into fishermen's nets that canneries couldn't handle the load and hundreds of dead fish were dumped back into the river each day. The next year, according to the Oregon Historical Society, markets were saturated when the combined production from 39 Columbia River canneries exceeded 42 million pounds.

Chinese immigrants made up most of Astoria's original cannery work force in the days when the town was as bawdy as it was muddy, with 35 brothels and 54 saloons. But mechanical butchering machines, which arrived in the early 1900s, replaced much of that labor. During wars that followed, as men enlisted into the service, women took over cannery work.

At Pier 39, site of the old Hanthorn Cannery, where the Columbia River Packers Association made the Bumble Bee brand a household staple, the turnover in the labor force is evident in the old restrooms: The men's room has four stalls, and the women's room 12.

A feminine work force, though, didn't remotely equite to a soft workplace. Competition was fierce among the canneries, and sentiment heated between canneries and fishermen. Unions wielded power that not everyone appreciated.

When Mae Wheeler joined a union, she remembers, someone used a fish skinning knife to scratch lines down both sides of her sky blue Studebaker.

Fish stocks rose and fell, but it was all downhill after the Bonneville Dam was built in 1937. At the old Elmore Cannery, where 418,000 cases of salmon were canned in 1941, just 150,000 cases a year went out the door by the early 1950s.

By the mid-50s, Clatsop County Historical Society records show, tuna was more important to Astoria's canneries than salmon. But eventually, corporate mergers and globalization spelled an end to the city's long-sustaining industry.

Enter Oregon's hot housing market, a churning economy and tourism, and it's easy to see why Astoria, which averages nearly 70 inches of rain a year, appears to be heating up.

Back to top