project date: 1999 | by peter reedijk

The Oregon Historical Society, together with Oregon's Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Celebration Committee - an organization comprised of county representatives, state and federal agency personnel, and representatives from the region's Native American community - contracted Sea Reach in 1997 for the research, planning, design, production, fabrication, and installation of wayside exhibit panels and bases at fifteen sites along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in Oregon.

Oregon's segment of this National Historic Trail follows the course of the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and then turns south following the coastline to the vicinity of Cannon Beach. Although the trail's route presented many interpretive opportunities, the clients selected only fifteen sites for the receipt of wayside interpretive exhibits. This selection was, of course, influenced by budgetary constraints, but it was driven by the national project's underlying theme - discovery! From the finding and naming of Hat Rock in Umatilla County to the vivid account of the great Indian fishery at Celilo Falls, to the first scientific description of the California condor in the Columbia's estuary, hardly a trail-mile passed without some startling discovery. Each of the sites selected for inclusion in this project feature, as far as practicable, site-specific "discoveries" relevant to the Oregon side of the Columbia made by the Corps of Discovery. All exhibits are displayed in National Park Service-style cantilever full frame pedestal stanchions as manufactured and installed by Sea Reach.