Coastal Oregon's Umpqua Discovery Center

By Bob Difley.
If you do your RVing in the West, sooner or later you will find yourself wandering the Oregon coast. When you pass through Reedsport, be sure to stop at the Unpqua Discovery Center, a fine interactive museum a few blocks off the highway depicting the history of the area where the Umpqua River empties into the Pacific Ocean.

The first settlers along the mouth of Oregon’s Umpqua River arrived as reluctant but fortunate survivors of an 1850s ship wreck. The survivors used much of the salvaged cargo from the wrecked ship owned by a Boston Merchant named Gardiner to establish a town nine miles up the Umpqua River. They aptly named the settlement Gardiner after him.

The Umpqua Discovery Center’s cultural history exhibits, “Tidewaters & Time,” tell the unique history of the town where daily life revolved around whether the tide was coming in or going out. Realistic murals and displays (created by local artist Peggy O’Neil) bring alive life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Motion sensors in the displays activate appropriate sounds and narratives, such as when entering the exhibit of the indigenous Kuitsh people, where a mural of a typical tribal village is accompanied by village sounds and rushing water where a man fishes with a spear.

From the inside of a rustic cabin looking out a window, the motion detector triggers a TV scene of a man named Wagner. He looks up, and says, “Oh! Hi. Glad you could drop by.” He then joins another man, Henderson, as they walk and describe a historical journey of the importance of logging along the Oregon coast. “Both men are 3rd generation local loggers,” Portia Harris, the museum director tells me, “and Henderson’s son, the 4th generation, is also a logger.”

In other displays you hear the distinctive creaking of a wooden sailing ship, the cries of sea gulls, a ship’s whistle, the clang of a paddle wheeler’s bell. The new (September 2005) 1.2 million dollar wing features the natural history of the region, and follows a path through sixteen interpretive zones from sea level to the peaks of the Coast Range, illustrating the complexity and interdependence of the ecosystem.