Hammond / Warrenton — Fort Stevens, the Peter Iredale Wreck, and a WWII Shelling That Actually Happened

What Hammond / Warrenton Actually Is

Hammond is not currently its own incorporated municipality -- it voted to disincorporate in November 1991 and formally merged into the neighboring City of Warrenton on December 5, 1991. Warrenton itself grew from several once-separate settlements around the mouth of the Columbia (Flavel, Fort Stevens, Hammond, Lexington, and Skipanon, per the Oregon Encyclopedia), so a "Hammond" address today is a Warrenton city address in a specific, still locally recognized neighborhood on the western tip of Clatsop Spit -- the sandy peninsula formed where the Columbia River meets the Pacific. That geography is the whole story here: Hammond sits closer to open ocean and the river's mouth than almost anywhere else on the Oregon coast, with Fort Stevens State Park's beach, the Columbia River South Jetty, and the Hammond Marina boat basin all within its small footprint.

The Hammond Marina itself has a documented civic history worth knowing: the basin was designed in the 1940s, transferred to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1954, leased to the (then-independent) Town of Hammond starting in 1967, and taken over by the City of Warrenton in 1991 -- the same year Hammond disincorporated -- with full ownership formally transferring to Warrenton by 2019. Today Hammond functions as one of the primary staging points for the Buoy 10 salmon fishery, one of the most heavily fished stretches of the West Coast every August and September as migrating Chinook and coho stack up at the river's mouth before pushing upstream, alongside sturgeon fishing, Dungeness crabbing in the estuary, and razor-clam digging on the ocean beach south toward Gearhart and Seaside.

The community's most distinctive feature, though, is inside Fort Stevens State Park: Fort Stevens itself, a coastal defense installation first commissioned during the Civil War (under President Lincoln, to guard against Confederate or British naval disruption of Columbia River shipping) and active for 84 years until 1947. Its Battery Russell -- completed in 1904, armed with two 10-inch disappearing rifles, and named for Civil War Bvt. Maj. Gen. David A. Russell -- is the site of a genuinely rare piece of American WWII history covered in detail below. The park also holds the wreck of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted British steel ship built in 1890 that ran aground on Clatsop Spit on October 25, 1906 and has sat, slowly decaying, on the open beach ever since -- one of the most-photographed shipwrecks on the entire West Coast, and a visible reminder of why this stretch of water has been called the "Graveyard of the Pacific": more than 2,000 vessels and roughly 700 lives lost at the Columbia River bar since record-keeping began in 1792.

Fort Stevens and the June 21, 1942 Shelling -- A Real, Documented Attack

This is the fact that makes Hammond genuinely distinctive among small Oregon coast communities, and it did happen, verifiably: on the night of June 21, 1942, at approximately 11:30 p.m., the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-25 surfaced off the coast and fired on Fort Stevens, targeting Battery Russell. Sources describe roughly 17 rounds fired, though witnesses ashore counted closer to 9-14 audible shots; the shells landed harmlessly in the sand and scrub around the battery, causing only minor property damage -- a baseball backstop and a power line among the reported casualties of the attack itself, with one soldier cutting his head while rushing to his post. No return fire was ordered during the 20-to-30-minute attack, in part because the telephone line used to relay fire-control orders to the guns was damaged early in the shelling. It remains, by the most commonly cited framing in military histories of the event, the only mainland U.S. military installation to be fired on by a foreign power during World War II, and the only continental U.S. military base to come under hostile fire of any kind since the War of 1812.

Fort Stevens State Park today preserves that history directly: visitors can walk the underground/earthworks gun batteries (including Battery Russell itself), tour a military museum, and see original coastal-defense infrastructure, alongside a very different kind of park experience -- the park is Oregon's largest state park campground, with 482-plus campsites (174 full RV hookups, 302 electric/water sites, 6 tent sites) plus yurts and cabins, spread across roughly 4,300 acres that also include 15 miles of hiking and biking trails, freshwater Coffenbury Lake, a disc golf course, and the beach access to the Peter Iredale wreck. For a buyer, that combination -- genuine, verifiable military history plus one of the state's largest campgrounds right next door -- is a real amenity and a real seasonal-traffic consideration worth weighing together, not separately.