The Earliest Days of Bayocean School

A family like Bertha Pearl Morgan's
living in Bayocean's tent city.
Tillamook County Pioneer Museum

The Tillamook County Pioneer Museum has a paper titled "Memories Of Bayocean School" written by Bertha Pearl Morgan. In 1907, when she was just 9 years old, Bertha's family traveled to Oregon from Minnesota to find work. The men signed on as laborers to construct Potter's resort at Bayocean. The family lived in the tent city set up for workers.

Bertha said the school she attended "was about a quarter of a mile toward the worker's camp from the cape. a oneroom school house on the ocean side. one teacher, there was a tribe of Indians on the cape, and nine Indian kids went to school, and two white kids swedes from the lighthouse, Bob and Ruth Ford. and me from the spit." Later, "one Indian girl was bout 16, Ruth Ford was 9 or 10, and Bob was about 14, and the rest in between, just a nice bunch of country kid. and Happy I think." 

Photo of the last Bayocean Schoolhouse, in the 1940s, with Russell Parker on the left and Harold Bennett on the right.
From Tillamook County Pioneer Museum collection.

She described a tree in front of the school with a large limb that hung out over the ocean, where Bertha said the kids would "sit with our shoes and stockings off, and let the waves from the ocean wash our feet at high tide." But someone told on them, and Bayocean Park Superintendent Jim O'Donnell had workers cut the branch off. The kids were angry at the time, but looking back she knew it was for the best, because if they'd fallen they'd have drowned. "...but kids will be kids, and we loved everyminute of it, lessons were nil. just play, School days." Two schools would later be built out on the spit itself.