Cape Shoalwater was still navigable in 1881, but in 20 years the cove would become so shoaled that the U.S. mail would be carried by horse-drawn stage to Tokeland. Decades later in the 1960s, the cape completely succumbed to the sea.

In the early 1900s, there had been homes, a store, a post office, a small hotel, two clam canneries, a Knights of Maccabees hall, the Willapa Bay Life-Saving Station, the Willapa Bay Lighthouse, and a cemetery. All are gone, washed into the sea, although the the cemetery was saved and moved across the highway. (Currently, local residents are waging a successful action to preserve what is left of the village now more commonly known as Washaway Beach.)

In 1881, North Cove consisted of the lighthouse, the volunteer life saving crew, a handful of homes, a school housed in the Smith home, and the small hotel operated by Lucy Johnson. The town had not yet been platted — that would happen in 1884.

North Cove Lighthouse

In 1788 British Capt. John Meares, in his attempt to enter the bay, named both the cape and the bay “Shoalwater,” expressing his concerns about his ship becoming grounded in the shallow bay.

Regardless of Meares’ concerns, oyster and lumber schooners later claimed the bar to be quite approachable, as good or better than the Columbia River or Grays Harbor. Early pilots agreed that the Shoalwater/Willapa Bay bar was a comparatively safe passage but that it required a lighthouse.

In 1854, the federal government gathered the local Shoalwater band, led by Chief Charley Ma Tote, to negotiate a land settlement establishing a military reservation at North Cove. Four years later the U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses installed a fourth order Fresnel light to warn mariners attempting to enter the bay. With the addition of a life saving station in 1878, North Cove became a significant government outpost for several decades.

The lighthouse was a white-colored house with a conical tower which rose through the center of the roof. Situated on a cape dune, the tower was 81 feet above sea level. The original light could be seen a distance of 13 miles. A fourth order lens was considered a secondary seacoast light, and the North Cove (Shoalwater Bay) beacon could not reach passing ships 30 miles out to sea. The local lighthouse was much closer in design to the Smith Island Lighthouse in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, rather than the big coastal lights, such as North Head and Cape Disappointment.

Daniel (Cougar) Wilson was the first keeper of the Shoalwater Bay Light. Wilson, officially an assistant keeper in rank, served only 20 days, from Feb. 1, 1859, to Feb. 21, 1859. He quit after three weeks because no oil had been supplied to operate the light. Robert H. Espy — of the famous Oysterville family — was the next keeper, but lasted only 10 months, from August 1861 to June 1862. Espy protested a lack of a food supply and slow payments from the government.

The first keeper to stay for any length of time was Marinus Stream, who served from 1883 to 1894. Stream was transferred to the Umpqua Light in 1894, where he later lost his life at sea. Stream’s successor at North Cove was Rasmus Peterson, who served an even longer term, from 1895 to 1913.

The destruction of the lighthouse began in the 1930s, when the sea encroached upon the cape property. By 1939 the surf pounded near the lighthouse itself. In December 1940, a Coast Guard crew salvaged equipment from the building and then, with fire hoses, undermined the sand that still held the structure, toppling it into the surf. The Coast Guard placed a new light on a skeleton steel tower, but it too was washed away 12 years later. Today, a light structure stands about a mile from the original lighthouse site.

North Cove Life-Saving Station

Government-built life saving stations were first established on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the early 1870s. In 1878, Congress designated the U.S. Life-Saving Service as a separate agency within the Treasury Department, and Sumner Kimball was named general superintendent and served in that post until 1915. Also during 1878, Congress authorized several stations for the Pacific Coast. From the mouth of the Columbia River to Cape Shoalwater, three life-saving stations were established, from 1878 to 1889. The first was the Shoalwater Bay station, while the others were the Point Adams (on the Oregon side of the Columbia) and Ilwaco Beach stations. In 1912 the Ilwaco Beach station name was changed to the Klipsan Beach Life Saving Station.

The first officer in charge of the life saving station was Capt. George Johnson. Johnson, with wife Lucy Paulding Johnson and daughter Stella, moved to North Cove after having first lived at Oysterville and Johnson’s Island (where Raymond was founded in 1902). After Capt. Johnson died in 1881, Capt. A.T. Stream took command of the all-volunteer life saving crew. Capt. John Brown, who had earlier operated the small Bruceport hotel, became the third keeper of the North Cove Light. (As were Johnson and Stream before him, Brown was a Norwegian immigrant.)

At the life saving station, the first paid surfmen served a 10-month tour of duty, wore a common uniform, and slept in a shared dormitory. The men practiced life saving techniques six days a week, performing life line exercises (breeches buoy), resuscitation, rowing, and capsized drills. The breeches buoy was part of the line fired from a line-throwing (Lyle) gun that was sent to a distressed ship or crew. The apparatus was a ring buoy, fitted with canvas breeches for bringing shipwrecked persons ashore.

The keeper handpicked his crew. In the two-story living quarters the keeper and his family often had the entire first floor, with the surfmen sharing the upper floor. The men worked together, lived together, and sometimes died together. Personal problems and estrangements could be a negative factor for the life saving crew, so an emphasis was placed on being a tight-knit group. In some places, such as the Hull Life-Saving Station near Boston, the surfmen all shaved their mustaches, in a show of unity and a commitment to the team. These were proud and brave men who were often placed in the public eye. Whenever community celebrations were held, the public was eager to have the Life Savers be a part of their festivities. When children and adults would see the surfmen in their attire, the response was often, “Look! There go the Life Savers from North Cove (or Klipsan)!” Today that respect remains with the local Coast Guard units.

In the early 1890s the station changed its name. When the South Bend Land Company, with whom Capt. A.T. Stream was closely involved, lobbied to change the name of the bay to Willapa Harbor, the Shoalwater Bay station also changed its name.

The last officer of the station was Capt. Herman Winbeck, who served thirty years, from 1910 to 1940. During Capt. Winbeck’s long tenure of command, many changes took place, including the introduction of motorized surfboats, improvements and enlargement of the station, and the reorganization of the service into the U.S. Coast Guard. (In 1915 the U.S. Life Saving Service and the U. S. Revenue Service joined forces to become the U.S. Coast Guard. Later, in 1939, the U.S. Lighthouse Service also became a part of the Coast Guard.)

A member of Capt. Winbeck’s crew beginning in the 1920s was a fellow by the name of Norman Paulsen. Paulsen and wife Beulah, who worked for a time as North Cove’s postmistress, had a son, Pat, who was born at the station. Pat was about 10 years old when the family moved from North Cove to California in the late 1930s.

More than 30 years later, in 1968, a crew of the Smothers Brothers television show traveled to the North Cove area to shoot scenes for Pat Paulsen’s comic presidential campaign. Although erosion had already taken his birthplace, Paulsen quipped, “My hometown isn’t washed up at all; I prefer to think of it as a shrine preserved in brine.”

Along with the rest of the village, North Cove’s old graveyard eventually had to be moved to escape the relentless invasion of seawater. Today, Washaway Beach slowly loses ground, while almost a mile out to sea, the surf washes over what was once the site of North Cove’s town, lighthouse, and life saving station.

Writer’s Note: Various parts of the information about the Lighthouse and Life-Saving station came from previous publications written by Bill Jacobsen, Ruth McCausland, Jim Gibbs, and a 1880 volume entitled The U.S. Life-Saving Service, by J.H. Merryman. The Pat Paulsen segment came from Larry Weathers’ story in The Sou’wester, Spring, 1988. The lifestyle of surfmen was drawn from remembrances describing life on various East Coast stations.