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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2021
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TOP: This photo circa 1896 shows the wooden pilings that made Astoria susceptible to fi re. BOTTOM: The Astoria waterfront in 1880.
Astoria’s forgotten fire
By JULIA TRIEZENBERG
For The Astorian
A
round this time almost 140 years
ago, Astoria faced one of the
more devastating fi res in its his-
tory. Mostly forgotten today, what was
known as the “Big Fire” took out a sig-
nifi cant chunk of the city’s waterfront
district.
On July 2, 1883, a sawmill on 14th
Street caught fi re. The fi re spread
quickly along the dock and burned
businesses on Commercial Street
between 14th and 17th streets.
Part of what contributed to the
destruction was the fact that down-
town Astoria was built almost entirely
on wooden pilings.
When Astoria was expanding in
the 1870s and 1880s, storefronts and
homes were put up as quickly as possi-
ble. The area’s steep hills made it diffi -
cult to easily build its downtown. T he
solution at the time was to build out-
ward on the water on top of pilings.
Unfortunately, this design only lent
fuel to the fl ames as people worked
frantically to put them out. Without a
seasoned fi re suppression system, it
took time for bucket brigades to put
out the fi res burning on the tops of the
buildings. A pump boat also sprayed
water from the Columbia River.
Eventually, the fl ames spread to
the Oregon Railway and Naviga-
tion Co. dock. Thousands of cans of
salmon were stacked there, waiting to
be shipped out. Locals reported hear-
ing cans of salmon popping open all
through the night as the juices inside
them came to a boil and the salmon
cooked inside their cans.
Business owners in the area began
frantically putting their wares on the
street in an attempt to save them from
burning buildings. There also were
people who took advantage of this
chaos. Looters stole cases of liquor
that saloons had set outside, knowing
that the few policemen in town were
occupied with the fi re.
After the fl ames died down, a
furious group of vigilante Astori-
ans decided to bring the looters to
justice. They kidnapped one of the
thieves’ leaders and took him to an iso-
lated fi eld in the dead of night. They
off ered him a choice: he could either
be whipped and leave Astoria for good
or be hanged.
Not surprisingly, he took the whip-
ping and left for Portland the next day.
The city then began the process of
rebuilding.
Thankfully, 1883 was a very good
year for Astoria’s canning industry.
The salmon season had reached its
peak and the canneries processed a
reported $3 million worth of salmon
that year. This meant there was plenty
of money to invest in rebuilding the
waterfront.
The problem with the rebuild was
that locals repeated the same wooden
piling design they had before. There
is some debate over whether this was
because using pilings was cheaper
than an alternative or because the city
was focused on rebuilding quickly and
didn’t account for long-term invest-
ments. It’s likely both explanations
have some truth to them.
This miscalculation was like a tick-
ing time bomb for the even more infa-
mous “Great Fire” in December 1922.
Like the incident nearly 40 years later,
though, the fi re of 1883 was an early
example of Astorians’ resourceful-
ness and determination in the face of
disaster.
Julia Triezenberg is an educator at
the Columbia River Maritime Museum.