Our Story
A Community Built Around a Place Worth Saving
The Garibaldi Cultural Heritage Initiative (GCHI) exists because a handful of people believed this boathouse, and everything it represents, was worth fighting for. That belief has grown into a community.
Our Mission
A Living Piece of Oregon History
Since 1936, the Historic U.S. Coast Guard Boathouse has stood at the edge of Tillamook Bay, weathering storms, saving lives, and serving as a sentinel of Garibaldi. Today, we're restoring it as a gathering place for the whole community: a place for learning, culture, recreation, and connection on the Oregon Coast.
What We Do
Walk Out Over the Bay and See for Yourself
Walk out over Tillamook Bay and you'll find a building unlike anything else on the Oregon Coast. On any given day, the Boathouse might hold a class of fourth-graders dissecting crabs, a local group gathering for a coastal food demonstration, or a visitor spending a quiet afternoon with our docents and the photo gallery on the walls.
Since 2015, we've welcomed school groups from across the Pacific Northwest — over 70 a year, from kindergarten through college — alongside scouts, artists, birders, community organizations, history and architecture enthusiasts, and travelers passing through Garibaldi. Summer weekends bring open hours, kayak tours launching from the original 1936 boat rails, and workshops that connect people to the bay in hands-on, memorable ways.
The bay draws people in. The Boathouse gives them somewhere to land.
Our Legacy
Built to Last. Restored to Serve.
Tucked into the north end of Tillamook Bay, the Boathouse has been a fixture of Garibaldi’s waterfront since 1936. It was built for $27,500 on 100 hand-driven pilings, with 760 feet of pier reaching out over the bay. That length was deliberate: it let rescue crews launch even at low tide. Fully operational by 1937, the station housed two 36-foot motor lifeboats and a 26-foot surf boat on marine railway rails that could put a fully crewed lifeboat in the water in minutes. It was the last line of defense for mariners crossing the treacherous bar at the mouth of Tillamook Bay.
Of the handful of life-saving stations ever built on the Pacific Coast, it is believed to be the only one still standing over the water, with its original marine railway system in place.
Inside the Boathouse
History You Can Walk Through
The building is our biggest exhibit, but it isn’t the only one. Inside, vintage photos, stories, and artifacts trace more than a century of life-saving on this stretch of coast, following three stations from 1908 to today.
You’ll meet four Coast Guardsmen with deep ties to Garibaldi: John McCormick, Pat Patterson, Ollie Olsen, and Charles Farrell, whose Korean War–era uniform is on display. Look for our scale model of a Beebe-McLellan surf boat, the kind of boat crews once rowed out through the breakers.
Our newest exhibits bring the story up to the present. They honor the current Coast Guardsmen of the Year and Garibaldi’s designation as the nation’s 33rd Coast Guard City.
The history didn’t stop in 1937, and neither does the story we tell.
Why We Do It
Heritage Deserves a Home
Garibaldi is a working fishing and timber community with a long memory. The bay has fed families, shaped livelihoods, and defined this community's character for generations. The stories of this coast — the mariners who risked everything on the bar, the fishermen who built a way of life here, the Indigenous peoples who stewarded these waters long before any boathouse stood — deserve to be told and retold.
We believe that heritage deserves a home. One that's accessible, active, and genuinely useful to the people who live here and the visitors who find their way to this stretch of the Oregon Coast.
When a student holds a live crab for the first time, or a neighbor learns to identify the seaweeds in the bay out back, or a traveler walks to the end of the pier and understands what a working waterfront really looks like. That's exactly what we're here for.
Who We Are
Volunteer-Led. Community-Built.
The Garibaldi Cultural Heritage Initiative is a volunteer-run, community-led 501(c)3 nonprofit with deep roots on the Tillamook Coast. We were formed in 2015 by a group of local educators, community leaders, Port authorities, and neighbors who saw what the Boathouse could be and decided to do something about it.
The Port of Garibaldi owns the pier and the Boathouse and has licensed GCHI to operate the building and run its programs. It's a partnership rooted in a shared belief that this place belongs to the community — and should be kept open, active, and useful to everyone who comes to the waterfront.
Our board brings together a wide range of experience and expertise, all united by a shared conviction: this place matters, and so does everyone who walks through its doors. We don't have a large staff or a big budget. What we have is a community that shows up.
Visitors & Travelers
Come Out to the Boathouse
Throughout the summer, the Boathouse is open to visitors, free to explore, full of stories, sitting at the end of the most remarkable pier on the Oregon Coast.
Open: Selected weekends, Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day
Hours: Saturday & Sunday, 12pm – 4pm
Admission: Free. Donations always welcome.
Pier length: 760 feet (the longest in Oregon)
Accessibility: 7 ADA-accessible turnouts along the pier
Kayak tours: Available year-round with Kayak Tillamook