Long Beach, Washington
By Way of Introduction
The text below has been adapted from my Evergreen post Pacific County, Washington. Click on the link to read the full post, This post is designed to interest you in visiting my Etsy shop where you can buy the photo shown above in a variety of sizes as wall art. The video immediately below shows six different views I captured while visiting Long Beach on September 5th, 2016. The video at the bottom of the page shows different sizes of wall art available for this image. If you are interested in any of the other images I have shared, please leave me a comment so I can talk directly with you about what is available.
Where is Long Beach, Washington?
It is less than thirty miles from Raymond to Long Beach, perhaps the most tourist-oriented city in Pacific County. Less than thirty miles, that is, if you don’t mind flying with an old crow. By US Highway 101, the distance is 47 miles. You can expect to spend an hour on the road getting from one city to the next. Unless you are there in the summer. The 2020 US Census found 1,661people living in Long Beach. That number can triple with beach goers, kite flyers, and sport fishermen, all of whom tend to show up when the weather is warmest. Go figure.
Early Tourist History
From the start, Long Beach has been a tourist destination. In the 1800s, no roads went west from Portland to the Oregon Coast. Rich folk from Portland would get on a steamship and head down the Columbia to Astoria. From there, they took a ferry across to the white sand beaches of the peninsula. Jennifer Ott, writing the HistoryLink post on Long Beach suggests that some 5,000 visitors a year were traveling to the area by the mid 1880s. Note that there were no roads connecting the southwestern coastal area to the Washington interior, so the “tourists” were mostly from Oregon.
Long Beach in the Twentieth Century
As the Oregon Coast resorts became available, the people of the Long Beach peninsula found new ways of attracting guests. Indoor swimming pools called Natatoriums opened, and the long, white sand beach provided a venue for auto racing. In the 1930s and 40s, motorcycle races were all the rage, but the locals grew wary of the motorcycle crowds, and ended the motorcycle rallies in 1964. But have no fear, if you’re in the mood for fun and frolic, Long Beach hosts the Washington State International Kite Festival every August, and the town is home to the World Kite Museum. And if that’s not enough (I love kite festivals, personally), Boomer Estates’ website lists twenty-four events just from July through September 2022.
