Willapa Bay, WA 
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“As we were steering for the low point which formed [the southern] part of the entrance into the bay or sound, we shoaled our water gradually to six fathoms, when breakers were seen to extend quite across it. We immediately hauled off the shore until we deepened our water to sixteen fathoms.”
As a result of the shallows he encountered, Meares named both the cape and the bay “Shoalwater.” When visited by Meares, the cape was uninhabited and wild, visited only seasonally by Indigenous families who gathered clams, crabs, and berries. Despite its ominous new name, the hook of Cape Shoalwater was later settled as mariners found the bar to be quite approachable.
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Coastal steamers and mail boats began calling at the bay; harvested oysters, salmon, and timber increasingly fed markets as far south as San Francisco. As ship traffic increased, local merchants asked for navigational aids—buoys and a lighthouse—to keep vessels safe.
Cape Shoalwater was selected for the site of one of the second set of eight new lighthouses planned along the West Coast. The design followed a familiar pattern of the era: a modest 1½-story Cape-style keeper’s house with a short tower rising through the center of the roof. Local Indigenous people assisted in landing construction materials by canoe during the spring of 1858.
The lighthouse was placed in operation on October 1, 1858 with William B. Wells as its first keeper. It used a fourth-order Fresnel lens that displayed “a fixed white light, interrupted by a flash every two minutes.” The lighthouse looked destined to have a short life as in June of 1859 a Notice to Mariners announced that two lightships and twenty-five lighthouses, including Shoalwater Bay Lighthouse, would be discontinued in a few months! The Lighthouse Board was allowed to discontinue lights from time to time as they became “useless by reason of mutations of commerce, and changes of channels, of harbors, and other causes.”
The Lighthouse Board reversed its decision two years later, and Shoalwater Bay Lighthouse returned to operation in 1861 with Robert Espy as its keeper. The dune-blown landscape forced keepers to cope with relentless sand and encroaching surf. In the late 1860s, the service built a protective bulkhead around the foundation of the lighthouse to keep sand in place and then planted shrubs around the bulkhead. Later, willows were planted as a protection against drifting sands.
In 1874, the Lighthouse Board noted that an extension had been added to the dwelling to serve as a kitchen and for other purposes. A woodshed and boathouse were also built at that time. A new barn was constructed in 1890, and a galvanized-iron oil house was added in 1907.
Keepers who served at Cape Shoalwater recorded daily life in handwritten logs—providing snapshots of isolation, humor, mishap, and grief.
“Mr. John Telbin was placed on duty as Assistant Light Keeper. Goodby Mitchell you infernal thief and Bummer.”
Keepers also noted the everyday oddities of coastal life. On September 1, 1881, Smith described a cattle mishap off the point:
“Shipped the cattle on board the scow and started to go to the vessel, but towed the scow under and dumped all of the cattle (38) in the water just outside the point, south of the boat house. The cattle all swam first to the point, and then from the point directly across the cove to the boat house, don’t think there was any lost.”
Other entries show the station’s ties to community events and personal tragedy. On July 31, 1883, Smith recorded visitors bound for a summer religious gathering:
“Two sailboats and the steamer in today all loaded down with Camp Meeting people. Camp Meeting to be held at Ocean Park for the first time and this will be my last full month at this station, thank the Lord.”
In 1893, Keeper Marinus A. Stream recorded a family illness and loss that underscore how remote life at the light could be:
August 28, 1893 - Sent for the Doctor this morning. Baby being very sick. Doctor staid all night. Dr. pronounced the children’s sickness Scarlet Fever.
August 29 - Doctor left at 5 o’clock [apparently the baby died]
September 4 - Pulled up to South Bend in small boat in the company of Capt. Brown. Left South Bend to go to Fernhill Cemetery to buy a lot.
September 11 - I am going to leave the station today to go up to Willapa with the body of my stepdaughter to bury it in the Fernhill Cemetery. Will be gone for two days. Went out to the graveyard this morning and exhumed the body. Had to work alone at it, as none of the Life [Saving Station] Crew would help me. Left at 3 p.m. on the Mail boat for South Bend with it.
By the 1890s locals had begun calling the area Willapa Bay rather than Shoalwater Bay, believing the term “shoalwater” might deter vessels from entering. The Lighthouse Service reflected the change in official listings, which evolved from “Cape Shoalwater (Willapa Bay) Lighthouse” to “Willapa Bay (Cape Shoalwater) Lighthouse.”
That renaming paralleled the growth of communities such as North Cove and Tokeland and the entrenchment of a local economy built on oysters, salmon, and timber.
The same forces that made the cape protective also made it unstable. During the first decades of the twentieth century, erosion steadily chewed away at the bluff. By 1939 the shoreline had receded to within a few feet of the lighthouse foundation, and the ocean was practically at the front door of the lighthouse.
The light of Willapa Bay Lighthouse, one of the last Pacific lighthouses to use petroleum as fuel, was electrified in the fall of 1939, and its last resident keeper left.
A newspaper account noted that on December 21, 1939, the Coast Guard, “giving up, took out the furniture, the musty records, the fine French glass reflectors—the same ones installed in 1858—and the brass light fittings and vessels, collectors items, every one.” The next day, a new flashing white light was established on an unpainted galvanized steel skeleton tower positioned 380 yards north of the old lighthouse.
On December 29, 1939, the lighthouse toppled down the bank and into the surf. Partially suspended in the air, its doom certain, the lighthouse had started to attract a swarm of people wanting to get a final glimpse of the lighthouse. To prevent anyone from getting hurt, coastguardsmen had set off a dynamite charge on December 27 in an attempt to send the lighthouse prematurely to its watery grave, but the structure’s grip was too tight. They then used powerful water guns to wash away the bluff on the west side of the lighthouse, and then waited as nature took its course.
Though the original structure is gone, its legacy endures. For eighty-two years the Cape Shoalwater (Willapa Bay) Lighthouse guided vessels into the bay and stood witness to a fluctuating coastal economy. Its story survives in keeper logs, photographs, and the memories of local communities.
After the collapse, beacon lights on metal towers and other aids to navigation were installed farther inland to keep pace with the eroding coast. Today, the Willapa shoreline remains a focus of conservation and coastal-management efforts, and the lighthouse lives on as a cautionary, poignant symbol—an object lesson for the sea’s power and the fleeting permanence of human structures.
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