Gearhart — Oregon's Oldest Golf-Resort Town, Quieter and Pricier Than Seaside

What Gearhart Actually Is

Gearhart's founding is a real, documented story, not marketing copy: developer Marshall Kinney and his wife Narcissa White Kinney began buying and platting land here around 1888-1890, extended a rail spur from the Astoria-Seaside line to a Gearhart stop, and built the first Gearhart Hotel and a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle auditorium that served as the young resort's community center. That first hotel caught fire twice -- in 1913 and again in 1915 -- and Gearhart at the time had no fire hydrants, so Seaside's volunteer department fought both blazes with hose carts. The Chautauqua building itself burned down in the 1930s and was never rebuilt. The town incorporated in 1918, formalizing what had been a private resort development into an actual municipality with its own government.

Golf is the other half of Gearhart's founding story, and it's a genuinely unusual claim for a town this size to be able to make honestly: Gearhart Golf Links traces its first holes to around 1888 as informal links-style play among the seaside meadows, was built out as a nine-hole course in the early 1890s, and grew to its current 18 holes by 1913-1915. It has operated continuously since, and multiple golf-history sources -- including the Oregon Golf Association and top100golfcourses.com -- credit it as the oldest golf course west of the Mississippi River, in the same early cohort as Victoria Golf Club (1893) and Tacoma Country and Golf Club (1894). Geographically, Gearhart sits on the Clatsop Plains between the Pacific and the Necanicum estuary/Neacoxie Creek, an area of wide, dune-backed beach that state geology research (DOGAMI) has found has net-accreted roughly 350 meters over the past two centuries -- but that regional, long-run accretion trend coexists with DOGAMI's own separately mapped active and potential erosion hazard zones along specific dune-backed stretches of the Clatsop Plains, so "the beach has been growing, not shrinking, for 200 years" is true at the regional scale without being a guarantee for any one lot.

Today's Gearhart is small in every sense that matters to a buyer: on the order of 1,900 year-round residents, a median age in the high 40s, and a housing stock that's roughly four-fifths owner-occupied rather than rental. The two named gated neighborhoods -- The Highlands, with tennis courts and a private boardwalk beach access adjacent to the golf course, and Pinehurst next to it -- carry the town's highest-end custom construction. That's a genuinely different profile from Seaside a few minutes south, which runs a boardwalk, arcades, and a much larger short-term-rental and day-tripper economy; Gearhart's own city government has spent the past several years actively restricting that exact business model within its own limits, covered in full on the investment-outlook page.

Dining, Golf & Things to Do

Gearhart's dining scene is genuinely small, and it changed meaningfully in early 2026: Pacific Way Bakery & Cafe -- a longtime local institution known for its Cape Cod-style building and vintage 1930s interior -- permanently closed. The current anchor is McMenamins Sand Trap, a full pub inside the historic McMenamins Gearhart Hotel on the golf course, open daily with the chain's own beer, wine, and pub menu. Prep Kitchen opened in 2025 at 3601 Highway 101 for grab-and-go Pacific Northwest fare on weekdays, and Fultano's Pizza, inside Gearhart Bowl, covers late-night food. That's a real, current, and honestly small list -- anyone picturing a Seaside-scale restaurant row should recalibrate before buying here for that reason.

Beyond the golf course itself, Gearhart's recreation identity is centered on its beach and dune corridor: the beach permits vehicle access from a 10th Street approach and connects to a roughly 10-mile drivable stretch north to Warrenton, Del Rey Beach State Recreation Site (within that corridor) offers marked horse trails alongside beach access, and the Necanicum Estuary Natural History Park gives a shorter, walkable option for wildlife-watching and hiking closer to town. The Highlands and Pinehurst gated neighborhoods sit adjacent to the golf course and add a private-club feel that Seaside's more public, tourist-facing beachfront doesn't have.