Nahcotta boasts a colorful beginning, marked by a bitter rivalry between two Peninsula pioneers on either side of railroad tracks dividing the town.
By the 1850s, a booming oyster harvesting and shipping industry was well under way and the town of Oysterville was founded only a stone’s throw to the north.
Several homes and a business or two were built where Nahcotta now stands, but most of the settlers gathered in Oysterville. Still, it wasn’t long before local seamen learned that the Shoalwater Bay channel, affording moorage for even the largest oyster schooners, made its closest approach to the western shore of the Bay about a quarter of a mile at what is now Nahcotta. Enterprising settlers soon realized that the wealth of the area lay not only beneath the waters but on the land, and during the latter part of the 19th century the logging industry boomed. Close at hand was not only the resource timber but the means of transporting it: The Bay itself.
To preserve the economy of the Peninsula, residents realized that a rail line linking the Peninsula communities with each other and with the burgeoning steamship travel along the Columbia River was vital. By 1888, the first five miles of narrow-gauge railroad was laid northward from the docks at Ilwaco, and by 1889 it had reached Nahcotta. Here the tracks turned directly east and shot out over the bay shore on pilings to the deep Shoalwater channel, separating the tiny community, north from south.
Oysters and other seafood from the Bay were loaded onto trains for shipment to Ilwaco, where they were dumped into the bellies of steamers bound for Astoria, San Francisco and points south. Also, by this time, all of the logging companies along the shores of the Shoalwater were rafting their felled trees to Nahcotta-Sealand and loading them aboard flatcars for shipment south to Ilwaco and the holds of huge freighters.
Aboard the growing railway, too, were passengers and mail bound for all points on the Peninsula, for the ferry boats crisscrossing the Columbia from the Oregon side, and for Raymond and South Bend across the wide Bay to the north.
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