Coos County County

The author states that the purpose of this book is to "identify and describe the scores of mills that populated the shores of Coos Bay from the 1850s to the 1960s; to record how these mills came into existence, then drifted into history; and to tell the stories of the entrepreneurs who made it all happen."--Dust jacket

xviii, 574 pages : illustrations (some color), facsimiles, maps (some color) ; 29 cm + 2 maps (color ; 77 x 61 cm and 81 x 61 cm)

"In total, the Pioneer Doctors of Coos County, Oregon covers 40 physicians (mostly those with medical degrees--but a few with only minimal formal medical training), who practiced in the area--the bulk of them starting from around the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s, and some a bit beyond that era. The book also expands into the history of the hospitals in Coos County, as well as pioneer dentists and the area's early drug stores. And for fun, there's a chapter on 'quackery'--featuring those whose ads for cure-all remedies splashed throughout the classified pages of local newspapers for decades"-- Back cover

xvii, 196 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 29 cm

From Aberdeen to Yarrow, NO PLACE LIKE HOME: THE UNINCORPORATED TOWNS AND COMMUNITIES OF COOS COUNTY, OREGON provides the history of the past and present communities of Coos County. Nine chapters provide details of the communities of the Bandon, Coos Bay, Coal, Coos River, Coquille Valley, Isthmus Slough and Beaver Slough, Myrtle Point, North Bend, Powers and Tenmile regions. Additionally, there is a detailed Introduction and a chapter dedicated the Coos and Milluk Native-Americans who possessed the land before the Euro-American settlers. This text relied on several local books of local history by local authors, internet writings, newspaper articles, museum research and personal interviews. There are over 550 photographs, maps, business advertisements and other documents.

322 pages : illustrations, maps ; 28 cm

Coos County began the transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agrarian society with the first permanent white settlement in 1853. This book is an attempt to document the next 160 years of that process. The first agriculture in Coos County consisted of subsistence farms marketing their surplus production to logging camps and mining operations. As the farm economy grew, an export market to San Francisco developed. By the late 19th century, shipments of cheese, butter, cattle, hogs, sheep, wool, leather, apples, and potatoes sailed from Coos Bay and the Coquille River. In later decades, blackberries, loganberries, cranberries, and various vegetable crops joined the shipments. Coos County ranked third out of Oregon's 36 counties for apple production and near the top for dairy products by 1910.

87 pages : illustrations (1 color) ; 28 cm

A one-of-a-kind readable history of the railroads that helped develop the timber and coal resources of Coos County, Oregon from 1850 to 1930. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the towns of Coos Bay, Oregon, grew from a few scattered homesteads to a bustling, ocean-going port. The area's phenomenal growth was fueled by timber and coal. Nothing was more important in developing these resources than railroads. Can't You Hear the Whistle Blowin' is the complete story of how these vital transportation links were built by daring entrepreneurs who drove lines of steel into the area's rugged mountains and deep canyons. From backwoods engines and wooden rails to town celebrations and bay-spanning bridges, Can't You Hear the Whistle Blowin' brings to life a time and place vital to the history of Oregon and the West. Author, William A. "Bill" Lansing has drawn upon decades of first-hand knowledge of the area, backed by hundreds of facts and figures, and countless hours of historical research, to produce a compendium of colorful stories of this robust time.

143 pages : illustrations, 1 color map ; 29 cm + 1 map (61 x 90 c.m.) in pocket

Published in local editions by Shirley Nelson, What Happened Here? Stories and Legends Based on the History of Coos and Curry Counties, Oregon weaves together local folklore, pioneer accounts, and historical research to chronicle the dramatic frontier past of Oregon's rugged southwestern coast. The book captures the dangerous realities of early coastal settlement, detailing shipwrecks along treacherous bars, gold-mining rushes in river canyons, and the often-tense interactions between Euro-American homesteaders and indigenous populations. Drawing on regional oral histories, Nelson preserves the vibrant, hard-scrabble legends that defined the daily existence of isolated coastal communities. A keen insight drawn from the text is how regional folklore functions as a vital psychological coping mechanism; by transforming the brutal isolation and constant tragedies of a perilous maritime frontier into enduring campfire legends, early settlers forged a resilient collective identity that helped them tame a deeply unforgiving landscape.

111 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm

Published in local editions by Al Sandine, Coos Bay Plundertown, USA is a blistering polemical history examining the corporate exploitation and environmental degradation of Oregon’s largest coastal port. The book chronicles how powerful timber and industrial interests, in collusion with local political figures, systematically gutted the region's natural resources and bypassed community oversight to maximize short-term profits. Through sharp critique and detailed local documentation, the text exposes the severe economic and ecological fallout left in the wake of unchecked industrial ambition. A keen insight drawn from the work is how resource-dependent towns are frequently treated by outside corporate forces as disposable sacrifice zones; the narrative reveals that "plundertown" status is not an accidental policy failure, but the predictable end-result of an extractive economic model that privatizes public wealth while socializing long-term environmental ruin.

175 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 22 cm

Published by local historian Steven Greif, A Century of Coos County Railroads chronicles the ambitious, logistically treacherous, and economically volatile history of rail development along southwest Oregon’s rugged coast. The book details the immense engineering feats required to carve rail lines through dense timber, cross treacherous waterways, and connect isolated coastal timber and shipping towns to the national grid. Through detailed archival photographs, corporate records, and local lore, the text charts how steel tracks served as the primary economic lifeline that transitioned the region from maritime isolation into a heavy industrial timber economy. A keen insight drawn from the work is how railroads on the Pacific Northwest frontier acted as both liberators and tyrants; while steel lines successfully shattered geographic isolation, they simultaneously bound local communities to boom-and-bust corporate monopolies, making the region's economic survival entirely dependent on external market demands.

57 pages : illustrations, facsimiles, map ; 28 cm

Published locally by longtime Coos County dairy farmer, historian, and former commissioner Gordon Ross, Yester Years is a collection of humorous and homespun stories documenting the trials, eccentricities, and daily realities of early rural life in southwest Oregon. Drawing heavily on family lore, handed-down anecdotes, and personal recollections of the Ross Slough and Coos Bay regions, the book captures a vanishing landscape where neighbors survived through grit, improvisation, and close-knit community cooperation. Through lighthearted and unpretentious prose, the text preserves the rich oral history of pioneers, farmers, and loggers who shaped the rugged frontier. A keen insight drawn from the work is how regional humor functions as an essential survival mechanism; by chronicling the absurdities and hardships of frontier isolation with witty storytelling, the narrative reveals that laughter was just as vital as physical labor in subduing an unforgiving wilderness.

93 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Authored by longtime southern Oregon resident Granny Abbott, Bandon Tales: Stories of Country Life offers a charming, homespun collection of reminiscences documenting early homesteading, farming, and coastal community life near Bandon during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book captures the unvarnished realities of rural survival, neighborly mutual aid, and domestic routines against the backdrop of raw wilderness and sweeping Pacific shores. Through affectionate and straightforward prose, the text preserves the colloquial voice and everyday folklore of pioneers who carved out an existence on a windswept frontier. A keen insight drawn from the work is how domestic humor and storytelling served as vital psychological currency for frontier women; by framing crushing physical hardships through the lens of wry local comedy, homesteaders built emotional resilience and forged unbreakable social ties that kept isolation at bay.

111 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Thousands of visitors have been enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of the 378-foot Golden Falls of Glenn Creek, about 25 miles east of Coos Bay. They are part of the Golden and Silver Falls State Park, one of the treasures of western Oregon. Very few of the visitors have had any idea of the land, nor of the history of the land above those falls. Above the Golden and Silver Falls is a lovely valley about three miles long. For 60 years a few families lived their lives in that remote and idyllic location. In 1958 the bridge at the base of Silver Falls was removed and the road was closed. The land above the falls became uninhabited timberland, inaccessible to the public. This book contains scores of verbatim interviews from the survivors and their descendants, 160 photographs, and exhaustive research into original documents. Fully indexed, bibliography, maps, and charts.

viii, 320 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 28 cm

Blessed with vast expanses of virgin timber, a good harbor, and a San Francisco market for its lumber, the Coos Bay area once dubbed itself "a poor man's paradise." A new Prologue and Epilogue by the author bring this story of gyppo loggers, longshoremen, millwrights, and whistle punks into the twenty-first century, describing Coos Bay’s transition from timber town to a retirement and tourist community, where the site of a former Weyerhaeuser complex is now home to the Coquille Indian Tribe’s The Mill Casino.

xiv, 194 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 23 cm

This small booklet details the disastrous fire that destroyed Bandon, Oregon on September 26, 1936. Includes several black and white photographs of the town before and after the fire.

45 pages : photographs ; 22 cm

About two-thirds of the way from San Francisco Bay to the Columbia River lies Coos Bay, the larges natural harbor on the Oregon coast.... the subject of this book. It is a book about the social and economic development of a small corner of the Pacific Northwest from a coastal frontier into a major population and forest industrial center of Oregon.

163 pages : illustrations ; 28 cm

Ethel Kranick Reichenbach’s memoir, The life of a cranberry grower, documents the twentieth-century agricultural development and family-scale enterprise that established Bandon, Oregon, as the cranberry capital of the southern Oregon coast. The narrative traces the physical engineering of the coastal terrace—specifically the diking, ditching, and sanding of acidic peat bogs—which superimposed intensive commercial berry agriculture directly onto the wetland ecosystems, estuaries, and seasonal gathering grounds stewarded by the Coquille and Miluk Coos peoples. Reichenbach details the exacting logistics of coastal wetland farming, illuminating how isolated growers managed frost mitigation, intricate water-fluming systems, and labor-intensive seasonal harvesting while building cooperative marketing networks to access distant urban distribution channels. Ultimately, the work illustrates how specialized hydrological manipulation and community resourcefulness transformed an ecologically delicate coastal dune landscape into an enduring commercial monoculture on the Pacific slope.

70 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Study of the Coos Bay region focusing on the years 1851-1890. During this period a little known estuary on the southwest coast of Oregon became a thriving center for lumbering, shipbuilding, coal mining, and agriculture. This work is not intended to be a complete local history of Coos Bay, however the author examines those events and undertakings that have had special significance in the development of the area.

v, 70 pages illustrations 28 cm

Pioneers and incidents of the Upper Coquille Valley, 1890-1940 examines the isolated agrarian homesteading and localized timber extraction situated within the deeply incised river valleys of southwestern Oregon's Coast Range. Wooldridge details how the region's formidable interior topography—specifically the steep, heavily timbered slopes of the surrounding mountain barrier, the winding, flood-prone riparian bottomlands of the Coquille River, and the dense, nearly impenetrable temperate rainforests—strictly dictated the margins of early pioneer settlement, precarious overland transit, and grueling land-clearing operations. By mapping the arduous establishment of scattered frontier farms and logging enclaves that carved a tenuous existence out of the old-growth timber, relying on the narrow riverine corridors to navigate the severely restricted inland basin, the narrative highlights how this specific valley geography anchored a profoundly rugged, self-reliant pioneer society. Ultimately, this pioneer record serves as a localized spatial history, demonstrating how the severe overland isolation, immense botanical scale, and dynamic riparian corridors of this Pacific Northwest landscape fundamentally shaped the highly resilient, valley-bound character of the early Upper Coquille.

384 pages illustrations, maps (on lining papers), group portraits 24 cm

Charlotte L. Mahaffy’s Coos River Echoes provides a detailed pioneer history of the isolated, resource-rich Coos River Valley on the rugged southwestern Oregon coast. The narrative meticulously maps the intricate estuarine and riverine geography that dictated early settlement, illustrating how the dense, nearly impenetrable timber of the Coast Range forced early inhabitants to rely entirely on the river network as their primary transportation and commercial highway. By detailing the establishment of early dairy farms along the fertile, tidal bottomlands and the grueling logging operations that utilized splash dams to violently flush timber down steep, narrow tributaries toward the coastal mills of Coos Bay, the book highlights the profound pioneer reliance on the region's hydrology. Ultimately, the text captures the severe physical isolation of this coastal environment, demonstrating how the challenging topography and dynamic waterways shaped the distinct cultural and industrial development of the valley.

253, [2] pages illustrations, map (on lining papers) portraits 23 cm

The nearly 600 pages of the pioneer history includes a 100+ page alphabetical Biographical Appendix with short entries for several hundred people. The history section begins with descriptions of Coos and Curry counties. This history proper starts in 1795 and includes a number of anecdotes, reminiscences, biographical portraits, and city histories, as well as historical narratives. Topics include Battle Rock, Rogue River, southern Curry County, report of an Indian agent, Coos Bay Colony, Bandon Beach, Coos Bay, Coquille Valley, Coos economic activity for 1897, Curry County, Nosler emigration, mineral belt, and crimes, casualties and miscellaneous happenings. Includes photographs of significant buildings and local residents.

599 pages : illustrations, portraits, maps ; 23 cm

Published in 1898 by Orvil Ovando Dodge, this historical volume chronicles the early white settlement, resource extraction, and violent conflicts that defined the foundational pioneer era of Oregon's rugged southern coast. A keen insight drawn from the text is how its highly romanticized framing of the brutal Rogue River Wars as "heroic deeds" demonstrates the active mythmaking required by early settlers to morally justify the violent displacement of indigenous populations in pursuit of timber and coastal gold. The narrative details the region's extreme geographic isolation, explaining how the impenetrable Coast Range forced these early communities to develop fiercely independent maritime and logging economies rather than relying on overland trails. Furthermore, the book serves as a vital genealogical archive by preserving extensive biographical sketches and firsthand accounts of the resilient prospectors, sailors, and civic leaders who built Coos and Curry counties.

4 preliminary leaves, 5-468, 103 pages, 27 unnumbered leaves of plates : frontispiece, illustrations, portraits ; 22 cm

Albert G. Walling’s History of southern Oregon, comprising Jackson, Josephine, Douglas, Curry and Coos counties provides a sweeping encyclopedic record of the expansive pioneer settlement and resource extraction across the rugged Rogue and Umpqua river valleys. Moving beyond a standard chronological timeline, the text details how the region's earliest frontier infrastructure—including the grueling Siskiyou Mountain wagon roads, coastal shipping ports, and remote gold mining camps—was mapped directly onto the ancient, complex overland trails and riverine corridors long established and managed by the Takelma, Umpqua, Coos, and Tututni peoples. Walling chronicles the immense physical labor required by nineteenth-century miners, loggers, and homesteaders to exploit the dense coastal timberlands and fertile inland basins, highlighting how these isolated settlers relied on deep community bonds and interdependent alliances to survive profound geographic isolation and the volatile boom-and-bust cycles of the gold rush. Ultimately, this foundational regional history captures the rapid superimposition of Euro-American industry onto established indigenous geography, demonstrating how cooperative pioneer endurance successfully engineered the civic and economic foundations of modern southern Oregon.

545, [1] pages, [126] leaves of plates : illustrations, folded maps, portraits ; 30 cm