Fevered History Old Quarantine Station Reopens As Museum

A small and new museum in Pacific County recalls an era when cholera, smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague and yellow fever terrorized the world.

The pictures and artifacts in the Knappton Cove Heritage Center tell the story of the Columbia River Quarantine Station, where thousands of immigrants - mostly Scandinavians and Chinese - sailing to America were checked for communicable diseases between 1899 and 1938.

Medical advancements and declining immigration made the station obsolete, and a Portland schoolteacher bought it from the U.S. government in 1950 and turned it into a fishing camp.

The camp is long gone. But the teacher’s daughter, Nancy Bell Anderson of Gearhart, Ore., has opened the old quarantine hospital to share with Northwest history buffs.

She has gathered together artifacts found on the grounds over the decades: Chinese pottery and beer bottles, a blueprint of the hospital, a shower head from the delousing building and many items of uncertain use and origin.

“Who knows where some of this stuff came from,” Anderson said.

Bit by bit, Anderson is piecing together the history of the quarantine station and showing it to the public.

“What the heck. We’re just doing it,” she said. “If we get too polished, we’ll lose part of our charm.”

The museum is located on State Route 401 about three miles east of the Astoria-Megler Bridge on the Washington side. The hospital was built in 1912 to isolate immigrants with contagious diseases.

Admission to the museum is “by appointment and by chance” and is free, though Anderson said she hopes to get enough donations to sustain the museum.

The Columbia River Quarantine Station gained a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 thanks to an application prepared by Larry Weathers, who then worked for the Pacific County Planning Department.

According to Weathers’ research, Astoria residents asked the U.S. government to open a quarantine station - but not on their side of the river.

Pacific County residents complained that a quarantine station would “utterly annihilate” plans to improve the area with a railroad and city - but to no avail. The quarantine station was established in May 1899.

If an inspector detected a health problem on a ship entering the Port of Astoria, the ship went to Knappton Cove and moored at the old cannery wharf.

Passengers showered in a building at the end wharf and bunked on the USS Concord, a decommissioned veteran of the Spanish-American War, while their ship was fumigated with burning sulfur pots to kill disease-carrying pests.

Passengers with contagious diseases were isolated in the hospital or lazaretto, an Italian word derived from a 15th century church where plague victims stayed.

One of the center’s more interesting artifacts is an “open letter to ship captains” issued in 1912 by the U.S. Treasury Department that illustrates how serious epidemics were.

“Some people object to quarantine, but no one wants it abolished. Why? Because everyone has a horror of catching plague, cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, jail fever or leprosy. When a person catches any one of these diseases even friends consider him loathsome (and so he is), and the first thing they say is, ‘Take him at once to the pesthouse.’ “

After the government closed the station, the Bureau of Lighthouse maintained a navigational beacon on the dock for many years. The U.S. Army Signal Corps used the station briefly during World War II, but mostly the buildings and grounds fell into disrepair.