The Most Wicked Place on Earth. A Guide to the Sinister Side of Astoria The year is , and twenty year-old Richard Lewis opens his eyes, trying to place himself in what feels like a dark, damp cave.
The last thing he remembers is having a great time at the Astor Saloon. If he could just get the room to stop swayingβ¦ Richard, like thousands of men who passed through Oregon between from to the s, was a victim of shanghaiing β the practice of sending unwilling men out to sea, usually to serve on ships lacking full crews.
Let us be your guide for revisiting and reliving the dastardly scenes. Read more below to plan your tour through Wicked Astoria. A gallery on the second floor of the museum is dedicated to Vice and Virtue in Clatsop County: to Prohibition , where you can view artifacts from the time period and try your hand at a game of roulette in the partially-reconstructed saloon. The Heritage Museum building itself, designed in , was originally City Hall, and the jail cells still existent in the basement of the building, but not generally available for viewing saw their fair share of crooked characters over the years.
Visitors can flip through the records; those with family history in Oregon are occasionally even surprised to find the names and misdeeds of relatives in the books! The Heritage Museum is located at Exchange Street.
Here, you can flip through hundreds of photographs of the Lower Columbia River region from as far back as the early s. Because of the nature of the practice, few hard numbers exist, but some researchers estimate that as many as 1, people were shanghaied in Oregon each year. A few Astoria residents were well-known for their immoral business operations. Bridget ran a booming business for close to 30 years, and was well known by the locals for shanghaiing.
