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.
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.”
Umpqua Discovery Center is at 409 Riverfront Way in Reedsport, Oregon.
Web site: www.umpquadiscoverycenter.com.