9 of the Quirkiest Towns in the Pacific Northwest
In 2004 the mayor of Wallace, Idaho signed a proclamation declaring the town the Center of the Universe. The reasoning was unimprovable: nobody can prove that it isn't, so it must be true. There is a manhole cover marking the exact spot, and visitors line up to stand on it. That is roughly the register of this list. The Pacific Northwest does scenery better than almost anywhere, but these nine towns are here for stranger reasons: a village rebuilt as Bavaria to dodge bankruptcy, a gas station shaped like a teapot, a town of thirty people with its own historic district, and a thousand quilts hung across an entire main street every July.
Wallace, Idaho
The manhole cover is at the corner of Bank and Sixth, and the town has sold a great deal of merchandise on the strength of it. Wallace committed to the joke properly, with an annual celebration and a sign directing you to the spot.
The town has form for this. When the interstate was routed through in the 1990s, Wallace got its entire downtown listed on the National Register in 1979 to force the highway onto an elevated viaduct rather than through the buildings. The silver mines of the surrounding valley produced more than a billion ounces, and the Oasis Bordello Museum preserves a brothel that operated until 1988 and was abandoned so quickly the rooms still hold the occupants' belongings.
Leavenworth, Washington
Leavenworth is the most committed act of reinvention in the region. By the early 1960s the railway had rerouted, the sawmill had closed, and the town was dying. So the remaining residents voted to rebuild the entire downtown as a Bavarian alpine village, right down to the shutters and the lettering on the signs, and then simply kept doing it.
It worked almost absurdly well. The town now draws well over a million visitors a year, hangs more than half a million lights through the winter, and runs an Oktoberfest. The Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum holds a collection of more than 9,000 nutcrackers and nutting tools, some of them centuries old and most of them nothing like the Christmas soldier you are picturing. It is a theme park that people actually live in, which lands somewhere between delightful and unsettling depending on your mood.
Zillah, Washington
There is a building in Zillah shaped like a teapot, and it is a monument to political corruption. Jack Ainsworth built it as a gas station in 1922, while the Teapot Dome scandal was unfolding around President Harding's interior secretary, who had taken bribes to lease naval oil reserves at a Wyoming rock formation called Teapot Dome. Ainsworth's joke outlasted everyone involved.
The station pumped gas for decades, sat beside the freeway for years after that, and was finally moved into town in 2012 and restored as the visitor center. It is among the oldest surviving examples of American novelty roadside architecture. Zillah also sits in the middle of Yakima Valley wine country, with more than 20 wineries along the Rattlesnake Hills Wine Trail, so there is a reason to stay once you have photographed the teapot.
Florence, Oregon
In 1970 the state highway division tried to clear a beached whale near Florence using dynamite. It did not go to plan, the news footage became famous, and half a century later the town named a park Exploding Whale Memorial Park, which is a remarkable thing for a municipality to put on a sign.
The rest of the town keeps the same energy. The Sea Lion Caves south of town is the largest sea cave in America, and you reach the floor by riding an elevator 200 feet down into the rock to look at several hundred very loud Steller sea lions. The Oregon Dunes run 40 miles down this coast and pile up to 500 feet, and you can rent a buggy and drive into them. In summer the town holds a wiener dog race. Historic Old Town handles the chowder and the shopping once you have had enough.
Sisters, Oregon
Every commercial building in Sisters is required by town code to wear an 1880s Western frontier facade. Boardwalks, false fronts, hand-painted signage, the lot. The rule dates to the early 1970s, when the timber economy faltered and the town gambled on becoming a destination, and the result is a place that looks like a film set but functions as a working high-desert town below the Three Sisters peaks.
The strangest thing about it is the quilts. Each July the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show drapes well over a thousand quilts across every building in town, turning the whole place into an open-air gallery for a single Saturday. It is billed as the largest outdoor quilt show in the world, and it brings tens of thousands of people to a town of about 3,000.
Cottage Grove, Oregon
Cottage Grove calls itself the Covered Bridge Capital of Oregon and has the count to back it, with six historic covered bridges within easy reach of downtown and a paved rail-trail that links several of them. For a town of about 10,000 that is an unusual density of 19th-century engineering.
It has also spent a century being filmed. Buster Keaton shot The General here in 1926, staging a train crash into the Row River that was the most expensive single shot of the silent era and left the locomotive in the water for decades as a tourist attraction. Animal House and Stand By Me followed. More than 20 outdoor murals around downtown document all of it, and the Territorial Seed Company and Saginaw Vineyards handle the afternoon once you have finished bridge-hunting.
Joseph, Oregon
A town of roughly 1,100 people in the far northeast corner of Oregon has somehow become one of the bronze casting capitals of the United States. Two full foundries operate in Joseph, and the work they turn out for clients around the world has also been installed up and down the main street, so an ordinary walk past the hardware store takes you by monumental bronze elk, horses, and figures on nearly every corner.
The setting does not hurt. Joseph sits at the foot of the Wallowa Mountains, which get called the Oregon Alps, with Wallowa Lake and a steep gondola at the end of the road. The town is named for Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, whose band was forced out of this valley in 1877, and the history is taken seriously here rather than decorated.
Oysterville, Washington
Oysterville has a population somewhere around 30 and the entire village is a National Historic District. That ratio is the quirk. Founded in 1854 when two men learned from the Chinook that Willapa Bay was carpeted in oysters, the town shipped them to San Francisco during the Gold Rush at prices that briefly made it one of the wealthiest places in the territory.
Then the native oyster beds were fished out, the county seat was carried off to South Bend by a raiding party in 1893, and the town simply stopped. What is left is a grid of 1860s and 1870s houses, a restored 1892 church that still holds summer concerts, and mountains of oyster shell along the bay. There are no shops. That is rather the point.
Yachats, Oregon
Yachats, pronounced YAH-hots, is built on black basalt rather than sand, and the coastline here does things that coastlines generally do not. Thor's Well is a hole in the rock shelf that appears to drain the entire Pacific into it, filling and emptying with each swell; it is actually a collapsed sea cave, and it is genuinely dangerous at high tide. Nearby, Spouting Horn fires seawater into the air through another cave opening, and Devil's Churn is a narrow fissure where the surf detonates.
All three sit within the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area south of town, where the headland rises 800 feet straight out of the ocean. The town itself has about 700 residents, a disproportionate number of good restaurants, and the Little Log Church by the Sea, built in 1930 in the shape of a cross. Come at the right tide and the whole coast performs.
What They Have In Common
Almost nothing, which is the point of a list like this. Leavenworth and Sisters rebuilt themselves as somewhere else entirely and made it stick. Zillah and Wallace built monuments to a bribery scandal and to nothing at all respectively. Florence named a park after an exploding whale, Joseph casts bronze in a town of 1,100, and Oysterville has thirty residents and a historic district. Cottage Grove has six covered bridges and a sunken locomotive, and Yachats has a hole in the ground that swallows the ocean. Pick the strangest one and start there.
