Cannons on the Beach

Before it wrecked on the Columbia bar in September 1846, the Shark had spent eighteen of its twenty-five years in the Atlantic, chasing pirates in the West Indies and slave ships off West Africa. Three of its carronades came ashore on a piece of deck south of here. One was hauled up in 1898 and gave Cannon Beach its name. The other two lay buried until a storm in February 2008 stripped the sand back and a twelve-year-old walking the beach with her father found the first. Inside them, conservators at Texas A&M found wood, leather and rope.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Haystack Rock — 4.5 mi
  A 235-foot sea stack made of lava that ran down the Columbia from the far side of the state, now a nesting rock for tufted puffins.
• Fort Clatsop — 22 mi
  The log post the Corps of Discovery named for its neighbors, and left to the Clatsop headman Coboway five days after stealing one of his people's canoes.
• Tillamook Creamery — 24 mi
  A farmer-owned cheese plant that exists because Tillamook Bay had no good way out, and whose logo is the schooner the settlers built to make one.

More markers nearby

• Ecola — 6.3 mi
• Tsunami - Seaside — 12 mi