Saints or Sinners? Characters of Pacific County: Ed Loomis, too-often overlooked pioneer
Published 8:58 am Sunday, January 21, 2024
- The Yesler Mill, 1853. According to Frank Turner, owner, publisher and editor of the North Beach Tribune, later The Tribune, at Ilwaco (1924-1942): “Historians who know Puget Sound history better than they do the Columbia River, sometimes say that Henry Yesler of Seattle operated “the first steam sawmill in the Territory of Washington in 1853. However, Ed Loomis sawed lumber at Pacific City three years before that, and was probably getting ready to go out of business by the time Henry Yesler was ready to make his first cut.”
Edwin H. Loomis (1825-1889)
The Loomis name is one of the most prominent among the annals of Pacific County pioneers, but usually it is Ed Loomis’s younger brother Alfred Lewis Loomis of whom historians speak. His was the name connected to the development of early transportation on the Peninsula — his Ilwaco Wharf Company, his stage line along the weather beach and, most famously, his narrow-gauge railroad that ran the length of the Peninsula from 1889 until 1930. He was the one, too, who secured the early mail contracts from Astoria, Oregon to Olympia, the Washington territorial capital.
But it was his brother Edwin “Ed” H. Loomis, older by five years, who first established himself in the wilderness north of the Columbia River. Ed was among the early settlers at Pacific City, arriving with Dr. Elija White in 1849. There, with his friend Charles W. Stuart, he established the Pacific Milling Company, the first steam sawmill in the Washington Territory. And, although Alfred did visit Ed at Pacific City, he stayed only a few months, not returning to Pacific County permanently for more than twenty years.
Long before that, of course, Dr. White’s dream-city at the mouth of the Columbia had turned nightmarish for those who had invested in his scheme. When the federal government ordered residents to vacate the property in 1852 to make way for a military fort, business partners Loomis and Stuart moved north to set up their sawmill in the area that would eventually become Nahcotta.
They had laboriously moved the boiler by plugging all openings and floating it down Tarlatt Slough, only to have their potential mill workers leave en masse when there came news in 1855 of a gold strike in Idaho. The Pacific Milling Company’s machinery was used again in the first mill at South Bend, built by the Riddell Brothers in 1868-1869. Sadly, in recent years, the boiler has disappeared from its long-time home in Morehead Park, Nahcotta.
Being an ingenious workman in wood and in iron, Ed’s services were sought by oystermen who were starting a new industry in Shoalwater Bay. He moved to Oysterville in 1856, and by the improvements he introduced in boats and implements, helped greatly to develop the burgeoning oyster business. He was a skilled builder, and with his own hands constructed and sailed the yacht Artemisia, which took the Centennial Cup, contributed by the City of Portland to the Shoalwater Bay Yacht Club for the winner of the its 1876 Centennial Yacht Race.
Ed also saw a future in ocean beach property and secured hundreds of acres on which he began raising sheep. When his brother Alfred finally returned to the area in the spring of 1872, he immediately went into the “wool business” with his older brother. As it happened, it was an accident in transferring wool from shore to the steamer bound for Astoria that first prompted Lewis Loomis to get into the transportation business. He formed the Ilwaco Wharf Company and he was off and running, his brother Ed supporting his every endeavor.
After Alfred built his “mansion” in the Klipsan Beach area, Ed moved there, too. His death occurred only six months after the completion of the Ilwaco-to-Nahcotta railroad line and his funeral procession was powered by Locomotive #1.
On a personal note: my great-grandfather and Edwin Loomis served on the Oysterville School Board together in the 1860s and early ‘70s. Finding it difficult to recruit teachers to this remote area, the two men went to the Oregon Institute at Salem, Oregon (now Willamette University) in the late spring of 1869 to interview prospective teachers. According to family lore, they selected Miss Julia Jefferson, the prettiest graduate of the year. She taught for one year at the Oysterville School and then married R.H. Espy. (She was 19; he 44.) Espy and Loomis returned to Salem the following spring, again selected the prettiest graduate and Miss Elizabeth Britton became the teacher for the 1870-1871 school year. She subsequently married Ed Loomis (she 19; he 46) and settled in Oysterville just a few houses away from her former schoolmate, Julia Jefferson Espy.
