Shore Acres State Park

Louis Simpson was the son of Asa Simpson, the shipping and timber magnate who founded North Bend on Coos Bay, and around 1906 he bought the sandstone cliffs south of Cape Arago for a country estate. He built a three-story mansion with an indoor swimming pool facing the sea and five acres of formal gardens behind it, planted with things brought from around the world on the family's ships, including a Japanese garden around a lily pond a hundred feet long. His wife Cassie fell ill in 1920 and died in April 1921. That July the mansion burned.

Simpson started over, building a second house, two stories and 224 feet long, just as his fortune began to fail. Financial losses and the Depression ruined him, and in 1942 he sold Shore Acres to the State of Oregon for a park. The second mansion deteriorated and was torn down in 1948; the gardens, and the gardener's cottage, survived. In 1970 the state began restoring the garden, and today it is planted to bloom in every season, with a rose-testing plot and the Japanese lily pond. Since 1987 volunteers have hung holiday lights through it from Thanksgiving to New Year's.

Where the houses stood, an enclosed observation building looks over the cliffs. In winter, storm swells break against the tilted sandstone below and throw spray high up the cliffs, and from December into June gray whales pass offshore. A trail drops to Simpson Beach, a small cove below the gardens; Sunset Bay is a mile north, and Cape Arago, with sea lions and seals on Simpson Reef, a mile south.