Curry County
Cape Blanco State Park
Cape Blanco State Park is located just a few miles north of Port Orford in the northwestern corner of Curry County. The cape is the most westerly point of land in Oregon and, depending on how you measure these things, might just be the most westerly point in the lower forty-eight. (Cape Alava in Washington is the other contender for the honor. Depending on a raft of technicalities, including land shifts and the tide, the case can be made for either one of them. All things being equal, Alava probably wins the duel by about nine minutes of longitude.)
Which Anglo-European has the honor of naming this particular lump of stone is not really known, but it is suspected that it might have been a Spaniard named Martin de Aguilar in 1603. The rock face of the cape is a type of limestone that appears to be white when seen from the open ocean. (Aguilar's log mentions a white cape in this rough vicinity.) Subsequent seafarers gave the cape other names with Juan Francisco Bodega calling it Cabo Diligensias in 1775, and George Vancouver dubbing it Cape Orford a few years later, in 1792. The United States Government finally decided the issue and, by the time the lighthouse was built, all of the maps had it as Cape Blanco. Geologists tell us that the peninsula that joins the cape with the mainland is eroding and will eventually turn it into a large sea stack. Presumably, we will have to change the name again at some point in the future. (Maybe a catchy androgynous designation like Isla Blanca?)
Gold was found in the sandy beaches along this part of the Oregon Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century and, together with the quest for land, accounted for early Anglo-European interest in the area. (Gold mining operations on Cape Blanco's South Beach persisted into the middle of the twentieth century.) As Port Orford began shipping timber products in the later half of the nineteenth century, coastal shipping lanes were developed and the need for navigation aids along the rocky coast became critical. The Light Station on Cape Blanco was built in 1870 and is touted as being the most westerly, the highest above the sea, and the oldest continuously operating lighthouse in the state. It also has the honor of being the first in Oregon to have a woman serve as keeper of the light. Several members of the Hughes family served at the station at the same time that they operated a ranch on the cape. Their family home is a part of the park and is sometimes open to visitors. Responsibility for operating the light station passed to the Coast Guard in 1939 and changes in the technology of navigation eventually eliminated the need for the light. (LORAN took over after World War II and was followed by global satellite positioning systems in the 1970s.) The light station was abandoned in 1979. Today, it is maintained by the Bureau of Land Management under a permit from the Coast Guard, and is effectively a part of the state park system. It is seasonally open to the public.
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