In One Ear: Local brevities

From The Daily Morning Astorian, April 26, 1893:

• The Army Corps of Engineers have fixed the harbor lines for the town of Flavel. These lines connect with those of the Astoria harbor, making a continuous harbor from Fort Stevens to Tongue Point.

Note: Flavel, on Tansy Point in Warrenton, was originally a Native American village site. By 1896, Columbia River bar pilot Capt. George Flavel’s dream of creating a port to rival Astoria’s included building expansive docks and an enormous hotel, replete with a swimming pool, bowling alley, tennis court and riding academy. The town slowly failed, and was annexed by Warrenton in 1918.

• For sale: 83 acres at $35 per acre improved farming land with fruit tree. Twenty acres cleared, 20 acres pasture. Dwelling home, warehouse and other buildings. Half mile from steamboat landing at Brookfield, by boat or road. Inquire of Mrs. H.E. Stickler.

Note: Hopefully she sold quickly, as the Panic of 1893 struck on May 5, beginning a four-year depression.

Brookfield, in Wahkiakum County, Washington, established in 1873, was the location of one of business magnate J.G. Megler’s salmon canneries, Brookfield Fisheries, only accessible by boat. The town had a post office, a one-room school, a street of houses, and Megler’s turreted mansion. After the cannery burned in 1931, the town faded away. In 1957, the new landowner, Crown Zellerbach, bulldozed the remains.

• Help Wanted: Boys and girls wanted for can making. Apply at our office between the hours of 10 and 11 a.m., Pacific Can Co.

Note: Child labor for those under the age of 14 was common in the U.S. in the 1800s, and even into the early 1900s. It took Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal to put a stop to it with a 1938 federal child labor law, the first not overturned by the Supreme Court. This law banned child labor under the age of 14 in most industries, except for those under 16 working in agriculture and those working for their parents.