Bert Andrews (whose wife, Minnie, was Oysterville’s postmaster) is shown here in 1918 at the Nahcotta Post Office waiting for the train and its daily packet of mail for Oysterville.

My grandfather, Harry Espy, lived to the respectable age of 82 — most of those years spent in Oysterville as a dairy farmer. He was 13 when his father’s friend Lewis Loomis chose Nahcotta rather than the neighboring Sealand as the terminus for his narrow-gauge railway. In the first decade of the 20th century, Papa became a silent partner in the Johnson Henry Store in Nahcotta, and until cars and roads came in, boarded the train there for points south or, more often, a launch for points east. Yet, to my knowledge, Papa never called the town “Nahcotta.” He always referred to it as “Sealand,” which had long since disappeared.

In case you have forgotten, in 1855, John Crellin, Jr., an oysterman from the Isle of Man, filed a donation land claim for a site four miles south of Oysterville in the area of an Indian encampment called Nu-pats-tcth. Four years later, John Peter Paul bought Crellin’s claim and subdivided portions of it into city lots and blocks. At the suggestion of his friend John Morehead, a storekeeper and county commissioner at the time, Paul named his town Nahcotta in honor of Chief Nahcati who, with his family, lived in the area during Paul’s lifetime.

Paul created the town in anticipation of the arrival of the Ilwaco railroad in 1889. Although the railroad was supposed to terminate just south of Oysterville on Shoalwater Bay, Lewis Loomis and other stockholders changed their minds when they realized the deep-water channel came closer to shore in Nahcotta, an enhancement to transferring goods between rail and water. As an added incentive, Mr. Paul donated several blocks of his town to the railroad and lobbied for a post office which was established at Nahcotta on Oct. 16, 1899.

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, another town called Sealand was platted on the north border of Nahcotta. Sealand was the creation of B.A. Seaborg, a railroad stockholder, who lobbied to have Sealand named the official terminus of the railroad. For some time, he had been buying up land to the north of Nahcotta with the expectation of selling a large tract of his town to the railroad. On April 3, 1890, he also convinced the post office department to move their Nahcotta office across the railroad tracks to Sealand.

As a further inducement to convince the railroad that Sealand, not Nahcotta, would become the most important of the side-by-side towns, Seaborg managed to get Sealand on the 1892 ballot as a choice for the county seat. (You may remember that as the election which prompted the South Bend Raiders to kidnap the records from the county seat in Oysterville one slushy Sunday morning when the good citizens of that town were all in church.) The backstory, of course, is that Loomis and his influential friends put their efforts into South Bend’s bid for the honor and… well, you know the rest of that story!

On Feb. 1, 1894, the post office was moved back to Nahcotta and in 1900 Nahcotta storekeeper J.A. Morehead bought the Sealand town site, ending the rivalry between the two towns. Sealand soon disappeared from the maps and the Ilwaco Railroad and Navigation Company terminus was located at Nahcotta until the railroad made its last run in 1930. Nevertheless, my grandfather called the town “Sealand” until the day he died in 1959.

Zip Code 98637

Four years later, on July 1, 1963, the Zone Improvement Plan (which we know as ZIP) was introduced as part of a nationwide effort to improve the speed of mail delivery. Nahcotta was assigned the Zip Code 98637. And, at some point, Nahcotta became a contract post office, meaning it existed within another business which had a contract with the U.S. Postal Department. In Nahcotta’s case, the “other business” most recently was Bailey’s Bakery and Café, also being leased from the building’s owner.

That post office contract was negotiable until Feb. 21, 2021 when, with no advanced notice at all, the Nahcotta Post Office was closed. Period. Headlines screamed in newspapers across Washington state beginning in the Chinook Observer with Cate Gable’s column: Coast Chronicles: The ‘Little Post Office That Could’ gets the axe after 132 years. And in the Seattle Times and Spokane’s Spokesman-Review: She got $662 a month to run a tiny Washington town post office. When asked for more, USPS shut it down.

Nahcotta postal patrons — some of whom had received and sent mail from that post office for more than 80 years — were gobsmacked. They were assured that they would still have their Nahcotta 98637 address — but their mail would go to the Ocean Park Post Office and they would have to travel there to get it. But now there seems to be a new wrinkle. Packages being delivered by non-USPS carriers no longer recognize Nahcotta street addresses. Residents must use their street address with the name and zip code of Ocean Park! Say what?

So, whether or not you’ve lived for 60-or-70-plus years in the town of Nahcotta, packages from vendors other than the USPO must be addressed to Ocean Park 98640 to reach you. And, if you ask Google for the zip code of Nahcotta, it now lists two: 98637 and 98640. Who is it that determines where you live, anyway? The mind boggles. Perhaps Papa was right after all. Sealand makes as much sense as anything else… even now!