How Beacon Rock was nearly dynamited into jetty gravel around 1904 — and how geologist Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 to save it.
Let me tell you how close we came to losing this rock altogether — because that tower you're looking at was very nearly blown to bits and hauled away in barges.
Roll back to the early nineteen-hundreds. Down at the mouth of the Columbia, engineers were building great jetties out into the ocean to keep the shipping channel open, and jetties eat rock — mountains of it, broken stone by the ton. And some enterprising fellows looked up at Beacon Rock and didn't see a monument. They saw inventory. A whole mountain of hard, solid basalt sitting right on the river, easy to load onto barges. The plan was simple and it was brutal: blast Beacon Rock apart and ship it downriver as rubble. And this wasn't just talk — by some accounts the crews had already started, and explosives may actually have been set in the rock.
Now here's where our man comes in. Henry Biddle was a geologist from Vancouver, just across the way — and, as it happens, kin to the Nicholas Biddle who'd first published Lewis and Clark's journals a century before. Henry looked at that same rock and saw exactly the opposite of the quarrymen: he saw something irreplaceable. So in nineteen-fifteen, he simply bought it. Bought the whole rock, and the land around it, to keep anyone from ever laying another charge against it.
And when folks asked him why on earth a man would buy a giant rock, his answer was pure Biddle. He didn't buy it to mine it, or to fence it off, or to make a dime. He bought it, in his own words, 'simply and wholly that I might build a trail to its summit.' He wanted people to be able to climb it. And that — a rich man's beautiful, stubborn whim — is the only reason you can stand on top of Beacon Rock today instead of driving over its gravel on some road down in Astoria.
Photo: Kingofthedead · CC BY-SA 4.0
