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  • Pioneering “lady lawyer” deserved a better legacy

    Pioneering “lady lawyer” deserved a better legacy
    2026/02/17
    Had Mary Leonard died in 1890, she'd be remembered as she really was — a brilliant orator and an inspiration to future Oregon women and attorneys. But fate let her live another 20 years, during which she devolved into a total nut case. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1205b-mary-leonard-murder-trial-part2.html)
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    9 分
  • Acquitted murder suspect became first ‘lady lawyer’

    Acquitted murder suspect became first ‘lady lawyer’
    2026/02/16
    Many historians, eager to see in her the caricature of the nagging, garrulous fishwife and gold-digging black widow, have missed the real story of Mary Leonard — and done both her, and the historical record, a disservice. (The Dalles, Wasco County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1205b-mary-leonard-murder-trial-part1.html)
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    8 分
  • Fiery explosive shipwreck gave Boiler Bay its name

    Fiery explosive shipwreck gave Boiler Bay its name
    2026/02/13
    A MILE OR two north of the picturesque little Central Coast town of Depoe Bay, there’s a little unassuming wide spot at the side of Highway 101 where you can pull off the road and park. There are a couple trails leading down to the sea from that spot, and at very low tides you’ll often see people there, climbing over the ridge and picking their way down to the rocky, forbidding shore below. You’ll also sometimes see one of them stop to get a photo of a really incongruous thing at the top of the bluff. It’s a large, rusty steel pipe, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, shaped like an air duct or maybe a ventilation stack on a steamship. The pipe towers about eight feet above the ground and is very obviously buried nearly that far into the dirt below. That duct is one of two remaining large pieces left from what must have been the most spectacular shipwreck in West Coast history: The fiery, explosive demise of the steam schooner J. Marhoffer. And yes, that huge piece of steam-engine ductwork is where it is, sticking out of the ground hundreds of yards from the bay, because it fell out of the sky and jammed into the ground like a giant Lawn Jart after being blasted into the air by the explosion. Here's the story .... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2411b1004b.boiler-bay-shipwreck-675.069.html)
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    11 分
  • Bob Straub stopped plan to put highway on the beach

    Bob Straub stopped plan to put highway on the beach
    2026/02/12
    State treasurer Straub was a regular visitor to the state park through which the highway department wished to route the main Oregon Coast arterial. He took one look at the department's plans — and declared war. (Nestucca Spit, Tillamook County; 1960s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1708b.bob-straub-saves-nestucca-spit-456.html)
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    11 分
  • Shanghaied in Astoria: A once-perilous port city

    Shanghaied in Astoria: A once-perilous port city
    2026/02/11
    Desperate for men, shanghai artists once tried to kidnap the local Methodist minister. He turned out not to be as soft a target as they'd anticipated. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1203d-astoria-once-hotbed-of-shanghaiing.html)
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    8 分
  • Secretary imposed martial law on rowdy town

    Secretary imposed martial law on rowdy town
    2026/02/10
    Don't be fooled: Fern Hobbs was a secretary in the “Secretary of Defense” sense of the word. A practicing attorney, she was the highest-paid woman in public service. Copperfield's city fathers thought they could charm her ... they were wrong. (Copperfield, Baker County; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1708a.copperfield-affair-oswald-west-martial-law-455.html)
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    10 分
  • Legislators shut down Salem with a raging party

    Legislators shut down Salem with a raging party
    2026/02/09
    The six-week-long drunken party was thrown by the notoriously rascally Jonathan Bourne Jr. to keep the state Legislature from convening, so it couldn't elect John H. Mitchell to the U.S. Senate. It worked — well, sort of.(For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1201e-bourne-40-day-party-stopped-legislature.html)
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    11 分
  • Wolf Creek Tavern was a refuge for Hollywood stars

    Wolf Creek Tavern was a refuge for Hollywood stars
    2026/02/06
    THERE WERE TIMES, during Hollywood’s golden age, when Clark Gable simply couldn’t be found anywhere. Studio executives would search frantically for the top-shelf star, needing to talk to him about a project and facing a tight deadline. He’d be gone. In fact, he’d be fly-fishing on the Rogue River in Oregon, while staying in a small inn that today is the oldest continually operating hotel in the entire Pacific Northwest: The Wolf Creek Tavern. Clark wasn’t the only Hollywood bigshot in on the secret, either. The Wolf Creek Tavern was a regular place of refuge for a bunch of Golden Age Hollywood stars, including Carole Lombard, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Pickford, Orson Welles, and even John Wayne. Also, if you are more of a literature buff, Sinclair Lewis’s name is also on the guest register, and Jack London was a regular and did quite a bit of writing there. With his wife, Charmian Kittredge London, he holed up in a tiny little garret-like room over the hotel’s front porch for several weeks in 1912 to put the finishing touches on the manuscript for The Valley of the Moon.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2411a1004a.wolf-creek-tavern-674.068.html)
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    9 分