Surveying the Tillamook Forest near Jordan Creek - Sept. 2009

My name is Henry Norton and for as long as I can remember my passion has been ghost towns - learning about them, finding them, and sharing what I discover with other like-minded fans of the long-gone and mostly forgotten communities that still haunt the Pacific Northwest. 

Whenever I get the opportunity - which is more frequent now that my beloved wife of 45 years, Susan, has passed away and my children have moved on - I travel the lonely backroads of Oregon and southern Washington searching for the elusive evidence of those who came before and then disappeared. The Pacific Northwest in fact harbors a wide variety of vanished cities, protected in her deep forests and rugged plateaus. 

In the central and eastern regions, old mining and railway towns dot the countryside, and in the western region, the coast range is littered with the remains of logging communities. My recent research has been concentrated on the Coastal and Cascade mountain ranges of Oregon, where a handful of settlements seemed to have vanished between the years of 1885 and 1910. I invite you to browse my site and learn a bit about the rich history that Oregon has to offer!

In the Spring of 1890 or 1891 (with no written confirmation I have only oral histories to work with), a group of about 25 homesteaders, led by the husband and wife team of Uriah and Henrietta Corts set out from the logging camp of Broken Creek (also now vanished) in the Tillamook forest to set up a Utopian community on 600 acres of remote wilderness that had been given by land grant to Henrietta Foster Corts. They apparently survived for at least a few years, with minimal ongoing interaction with Broken Creek and the occasional fur trapper.   Click here for more information

The town of Granite grew like a weed and then vanished like a rainbow. Not so much formed on purpose as it was created out of necessity, Granite was a veritable crossroads of miners, loggers, farmers, and merchants. Tucked away in the secluded Black Woods of the Oregon Coast Range, and incorporating not only a small fertile valley but a rugged mountainside (reportedly rich in gold), and the surrounding heavily-wooded foothills, Granite was the probably the wildest Wild West town nobody has ever heard of.  Click here for more information

Valsetz was once a thriving logging town, West of Falls City in the Oregon Coast range. Basically nothing more than a company town, it lived only as long as there was old growth timber to harvest. When the timber ran out, so did the need for Valsetz - at least in the eyes of the timber company. Now all that is left is a suggestion of where Lake Valsetz used to sit for those who wish to venture out towards the Valley of the Giants, one of the last stands of Old Growth trees located past the old Valsetz Road on what are now logging trails.  Click here for more information

Approximately one hundred years ago a large resort town stood on a four-mile spit of sand seven miles west of Tillamook on the Pacific Ocean. The community was dubbed Bayocean because the strip of land lay between Tillamook Bay and the ocean. Unfortunately, the reverie of Bayocean would last less than two decades before it began to fall apart.  Click here for more information