Fort Columbia

The board's first permanent settler was not alone. James Scarborough, a Hudson's Bay Company captain, married Ann Elizabeth, a Chinook woman, on October 30, 1843, and that December the two settled on Chinook Point, below the hill where Comcomly's lodge had stood. When the Donation Land Law came in 1850, James and Ann filed together for 643 acres covering the point and most of the hill, still called Scarboro Hill. After James died in 1855, a widower, the claim was sold, and the Army acquired it in the 1860s.

What the plaque says

Fort Columbia Here was the home of the Chinook Indians and their great chief, Comcomly. Capt. Robert Gray dropped anchor near here after his discovery of the Columbia river in 1792. In the days of the fur trade this area was witness to many stirring events, and in 1843 Capt. Scarborough here became the first permanent settler to the north of the Columbia. For years this promontory served as a vital landmark for the safe crossing of the Columbia's bar. Finally, as a coastal fort, its guns here guarded the mouth of the river from 1896 until the end of World War II. Erected by the Washington State Highway Commission in Cooperation with the State Parks and Recreation Commission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Middle Village–Station Camp — 0.8 mi
  A Chinook trading town on the north shore of the Columbia's mouth, where the ground turned up more copper, glass beads and Chinese coins than tools.
• Cape Disappointment — 6.5 mi
  The headland at the Columbia's mouth, named for a fur trader's mistake and fortified, lit and manned against the bar below it.
• Astoria Column — 7.1 mi
  A railroad's 1926 monument to its own route, wrapped in a 525-foot spiral of Oregon history that ends with the train pulling into Astoria.
• Fort Clatsop — 8.4 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.

More markers nearby

• Middle Village, Station Camp — 0.7 mi
• Columbia River Explorers — 1.9 mi
• Fort Stevens State Park — 3.8 mi
• Tsunami - Seaside — 18 mi