| Set near the mouth of the Columbia River, ASTORIA was founded in 1811 as a private venture – a base for exporting furs to Asia – by the millionaire John Jacob Astor. "Fort Astoria" survived only a painful year and a half, beset by natu ral disasters and internal feuds, before it was sold to the British: Washington Irving made the best of the saga in his novel Astoria. A small replica of the old fort stands at 15th and Exchange streets, but nowadays many of Astoria's canneries and port facilities have vanished – the disused railroad tracks now gath er rust along the water – and the city is trying to reinvent itself for tourists interested in nautical history and working-class Northwest color. Arriving from Portland, the main road into Astoria, Marine Drive, runs parallel to the waterfront, once crammed with saloons and brothels in the nineteenth century, many equipped with built-in trap doors for "shanghaiing" drunken customers, who might wake up halfway across the Pacific. Eventually, workers at quayside canneries carried guns to get themselves safely through the night shift. Things are tamer now, but exhibits from Astoria's seafaring past are on display at the Columbia River Maritime Museum, 1792 Marine Drive (daily 9.30am–5pm; $5), which also features impressive displays of scrimshaw, native artifacts and reconstructed ships. From Marine Drive, numbered streets climb towards the fancy Victorian mansions of the uptown area, many now renovated B&Bs. Beyond, on top of Coxcomb Hill, the Astoria Column is decorated with a mural depicting pioneer history, and offers stunning views for anyone willing to climb its gloomy spiral stairs. Back in town, further west, the Flavel House, 441 8th St (daily 10am–5pm; $5; www.clatsophistoricalsociety.org), is one of the grandest of the city's mansions, the 1880s home of sea captain George Flavel. While the main rooms are set up as period dioramas featuring the furniture and decor of the nineteenth century, more interesting is the ungainly display of local castoffs like bank-teller windows, farm tools and horse carriages hiding down in the basement. A few miles southwest of town is Fort Clatsop (daily 8am–5pm, summer closes at 6pm; $2; www.nps.gov/focl), a reconstruction of the stockade/winter quarters Lewis and Clark built here in 1808. In the summer, exhibitions by docents in pioneer costumes are given on subjects like the proper ways to shoot a flintlock musket, pour molten bullets, and make beef-tallow candles. Further west, also off US-101, Fort Stevens State Park (tel 503/861-1671) offers trails, camping and miles of beaches, on which you can find the rusting hulk of the Peter Iredale, a 1906 shipwreck slowly sinking into the sand, but still enough of a marvel to clamber over at low tide. Although Fort Stevens was developed as a Union post in the Civil War, Battery Russell is its most significant military relic. The fort was shelled during World War II by a passing Japanese submarine, which makes it, incredibly, the only military installation on the mainland US to have been fired on by a foreign power since 1812.
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