Mary D. Hume: Ninety-Seven Years at Sea

At the Port of Gold Beach you can see the rusting hull of the Mary D. Hume, a steamer launched on the twenty-first of January, eighteen eighty-one, and built entirely from local timber. Her keel was described at the time as the largest stick of square timber ever floated down the Rogue River, and her framing knees were hand-cut from Port Orford cedar roots.

Built by businessman R. D. Hume and named for his wife, the vessel hauled freight between Oregon and San Francisco before moving to Alaska as a whaler, then a cannery tender, then a tugboat. By the time she was retired in nineteen seventy-seven, she had logged nearly a century of commercial service, one of the oldest serving commercial vessels on the West Coast. She returned to Gold Beach, sank in the Rogue River in nineteen eighty-five, and has rested there ever since. She was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine.