“Tillie” washed ashore north of Yachats in 1938 and her bones became a tourist attraction for years

On Aug. 21, 1938, a dead whale washed up on the shore near Big Creek north of Yachats.

The Corvallis Gazette-Times said the following day said “thousands” hit the beach trying to get a glimpse of the decaying and rather disgusting “monster” as it was often referred to, according to a story in the Oregon Coast Beach Connection. Some 50 feet in length and about 40 tons, newspapers at the time said it appeared to have been hit by a boat.

The new Oregon Coast Highway was a quarter mile from the carcass and local entrepreneurs would charge tourists 5 cents to cross a private bridge to see the rotting whale. A fertilizer and rendering company from Albany cut some of the blubber off, but much remained, and the stench was overwhelming.

Tillicum Beach was also the home of a small set of auto cabins called Randall’s Shore Pines Cottage Park. Its owner, Nelson Randall, spent several months dragging the bones from the beach and re-burying them in the sand to get rid of the fat and odor of the rotting flesh.

He then began reassembling the whale’s structure at Tillicum Beach and in 1946 the skeleton was dubbed “Tillie” and it became a tourist attraction for decades. The auto cabins included a gift shop called Tillie the Whale Gift Shop.

The bones sat prominently along the highway for decades. They were mossy and rotting by the 1970s and no longer remain today.

• Historical photos and text provided by the Lincoln County Historical Society in a partnership with YachatsNews. To learn more about the society and local history, visit its website here. A sampling of historic images from the LCHS collection can be seen at OregonDigital.org