While reporting on The Oregonian’s 175th anniversary, several longtime editors told me the newspaper was the oldest continuously operating business in Oregon.
The inaugural edition was first published Dec. 4, 1850, more than eight years before Oregon even became a state.
The oldest newspaper on the West Coast, The Oregonian has operated under six different owners, co-owners and heirs. In 1950, Samuel Newhouse bought the paper, and his family’s Advance Publications still owns it today.
Former publisher Fred Stickel used to say The Oregonian had “business license number one,” which was a bit of hyperbole. That’s not exactly how business licensing works.
Because I wasn’t sure that was correct – and we reporters are sticklers for accuracy – I didn’t make the claim in the story on the newspaper’s anniversary. But the question intrigued me.
What is the oldest business, founded in the Oregon Territory, that has never ceased operation and is still around today?
A quick Google search will produce two other potential claimants to the title. Both are unsurprisingly found in Astoria – the oldest permanent U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains.
To investigate, a road trip was in order.
The Columbia River Bar Pilots
While they don’t specifically claim to be Oregon’s oldest business, the Columbia River Bar Pilots say they have been providing safe passage to ships since 1846.
In December 1846, the Oregon provisional government established a licensing system for pilots along the Columbia River. It was one of the first things the new government sought to regulate because shipping was that crucial to the region’s economy.
And the mouth of the Columbia River – known as the graveyard of the Pacific – was that dangerous.
“There was a lot of trial and error before 1846, and there were a lot of errors,” said Len Tumbarello, executive director of the Oregon Board of Maritime Pilots. “There were a lot of ships going down. People took note and said, ‘We really need to formalize this and ensure that people are safe when they come in and out of this port.’”
Today, the Oregon Board of Maritime Pilots oversees standards for about 63 licensed maritime pilots serving three pilotage associations in Astoria, Portland and Coos Bay.
“Our mission is to ensure that there is safe, efficient, and reliable pilotage on Oregon waters,” Tumbarello said. “That mission protects human life, Oregon’s precious maritime commerce, critical infrastructure like bridges, Oregon waterways, and last but certainly not least, the environment.”
While the necessity of maritime pilots dates to that 1846 piece of legislation, tracing the “business” origins of the modern pilotage associations is a bit trickier.
Capt. Thron Riggs, a retired bar pilot, published a book on the history of the Astoria organization, aptly titled “A History of Pilotage on the Columbia River Bar.”
According to Riggs, the territory’s first pilotage license went to Shelah Reeves in 1847 in Astoria.
After losing two ships crossing the bar, he was also the first to have his license revoked, in February 1849.
Riggs said the modern Columbia River Bar Pilots can trace their roots to Jackson Hustler, who arrived in Astoria with his boat the Mary Taylor on Christmas Day 1849, establishing what Riggs called “the first reliable pilot service on the Columbia River.”
In 1853, George Flavel and his schooner California went into competition with Hustler, who soon sold the Mary Taylor and went to work for Flavel.
In 1887, Flavel turned his business over to his son, George C. Flavel, and Asa Simpson. Charles Gunderson was hand-picked by retiring Flavel to lead his crew of pilots.
According to Riggs, it was Gunderson who, in 1915, consolidated the bar pilots into the shared ownership model that remains today.
“He started running the business in a way that a modern pilot would recognize,” Riggs said. “At the end of the month you took in all your receivables, paid bills, pooled them, paid your expenses, and then distributed equally amongst the pilots what was left over. That’s how it’s still done.”
Van Dusen companies
Another Astoria family of businesses, the Van Dusen companies, proudly claims it is “Oregon’s oldest family business,” established in 1849.
And as far as Mac Burns, executive director of the Clatsop County Historical Society, is concerned, the Van Dusens have the title.
“The Van Dusen family has been in Astoria and doing business since the 1840s,” Burns said. “I am hard pressed to find a similar family doing business continuously in the same place.”
The Van Dusen story begins in 1847, when Adam Van Dusen and his wife, Caroline, traveled west from Michigan to Oregon Territory. After first stopping in Oregon City, they arrived in Astoria in 1848.
Caroline Van Dusen’s diary describes a difficult first winter on a donation land claim. By the spring of 1849, the family had moved closer to town. That same year, Adam opened a mercantile store.
The business, A. Van Dusen & Co., stood out from the more established Hudson’s Bay Company by offering goods displayed on shelves – a novel concept at the time.
A history of the Van Dusen family, put out by the Clatsop County Historical Society in 1982, said Adam’s son, Brenham, took over the store when he was of age, while his father operated an insurance office upstairs.
It’s unclear when the mercantile side of the business closed. Ads for A. Van Dusen & Co. store ran regularly in the Daily Astorian until 1889.
By the 1896 Astoria City Directory, Van Dusen & Co. is listed as a real estate, insurance and commission office at 119 11th St., roughly where Astoria Coffee House & Bistro is located today.
The modern era of the family business began with fourth-generation owner Lloyd Fulton Van Dusen, who returned home from service during World War II and saw an opportunity in a different industry.
In 1947, he and his brother bought Kendall’s Bottling Works, renaming it Van Dusen Beverage.
They ran both the insurance and bottling businesses until 1973, when they sold Van Dusen Insurance and made the Pepsi plant their focus.
Today, the Van Dusens’ businesses including real estate holdings and a vacation rental, but beverages remain its core.
If you’re buying a Pepsi in Clatsop County, you’re buying it from the Van Dusens.
The company employs 19 people and operates as an independent bottler — part of a system that dates to the early 20th century, when soft drink companies relied on local franchisees to produce and distribute beverages in their regions.
“If you think back to the first half of the 1900s, it’s all in glass bottles with wooden shells,” said Trudy Van Dusen, who with her brother Willis “Junior” Van Dusen are the sixth-generation owners of the business. “You think of the infrastructure, the roads and the trucks. It was not cost effective to produce a bottle of Pepsi in Portland and drive it out here.”
To encourage investment in community bottling plants, soda companies granted families like the Van Dusens territorial franchises “in perpetuity.”
When most soda products switched from glass bottles to cans and plastic, groups of local bottlers pooled together on co-op production plants. Van Dusen Beverages are today mostly bottled in either Mt. Angel, Oregon, or Tumwater, Washington, and distributed out of Astoria across Clatsop County and parts of Columbia County.
They also have the local distribution rights for other Pepsi-Co-owned beverages including Mountain Dew and Mug Root Beer, and have the area’s bottling and distribution rights for a major non-PepsiCo product: Dr. Pepper. They’ve also launched their own bottled water brand, Crystal Cascade.
Many of these bottler franchisees have been bought out over the decades, but Van Dusen Beverage remains small. Willis Van Dusen Sr., the fifth generation of the company, describes it as “the smallest Pepsi bottler in the world.” Still, the company’s exclusive regional rights provide stability.
“Our little business is pretty well protected,” Willis Sr. said. “I think the future is really bright.”
The Van Dusens didn’t start claiming to be Oregon’s oldest business until 2011, Willis Sr. said, during Astoria’s bicentennial celebration. He was the city’s mayor at the time, and the Clatsop County Historical Society was doing research into the town’s history.
“I said, ‘We used to be the oldest business in Oregon because we’ve been had a mercantile, started in 1849, but we quit selling insurance in 1973, so I thought we lost it in ’73.’ They said, ‘Well, wait a minute. You’re not selling buggy whips anymore either.’ ”
The historical society, he said, gave the Van Dusens the nod to stick with the claim.
“They went back and researched everything,” Willis Sr. said. “The same family, the same lineage. You are the oldest business.”
Other contenders…
To try and settle the question, I went to Kerry Tymchuk, executive director of the Oregon Historical Society.
He did a bit of research and produced yet another possible contender: Willamette University, founded in 1842 as the Oregon Institute by Methodist missionary Jason Lee.
The school began by teaching the children of missionaries. It later became a college and changed its name to “Wallamet” University in 1852. The school updated the spelling in 1870.
Today it’s a private liberal arts college and law school, still operating in Salem.
“I would say you can call Willamette a business,” Tymchuk said. “It’s not a nonprofit. Certainly, Willamette is the oldest university in Oregon and oldest university west of the Mississippi.”
(Tymchuk, perhaps worth noting here, is both a graduate of and member of the board of trustees for Willamette University.)
He also gave an honorable mention to Stimson Lumber, founded in 1850 – but in Michigan, not Oregon.
And the winner is?
So, who takes the title? Well, it depends on how you define a business.
Willamette University might be the oldest continuously operating institution.
The Columbia River Bar Pilots might be the oldest continuously operating association.
The Oregonian might be the oldest continuously operating business producing the same product.
But seemingly no one has operated a business continuously in the Oregon Territory longer than the Van Dusen family.
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