Clatsop County OR Archives Biographies.....Stanley, Mrs. Mary Eliza (Grimes) December 19, 1846 - February 18, 1928
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Source: History of the Columbia River Valley From The Dalles to the Sea, Vol. III, Published 1928, Pages 650 - 654
Author: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company

     MRS. MARY ELIZA (GRIMES) STANLEY, the widow of Samuel K. Stanley, was one 
of Seaside's most highly esteemed pioneer women and had attained the age of 
eighty-one years when she passed away in that city on the 18th of February, 
1928, at the home of her daughter, Mrs. J. E. Oates. She was seventy-five 
years old when in December, 1921, she wrote the following interesting 
autobiography for publication in the Journal:

     "I was born in Coffee county, Alabama, December 19, 1846. My father, 
George Kanaga Grimes, was born in North Carolina. My mother, whose maiden name 
was Mary Frederic, was born in Georgia. My father was born about 1821. He was 
about twenty-five years old when I was born, but he always seemed like an old 
man to me. When he was twenty-one years old he was sick and his hair turned 
white and somehow it is hard to think of a person with white hair as young. 
Mother died not long before the breaking out of the Civil war. My father took 
no part in that war, but my two brothers, though mere boys, wore the gray and 
one of them was wounded. A lot of our friends, after Lee had surrendered, went 
either to Mexico or to South America. My father, one of my brothers and I went 
to Brazil. Father was going to get a plantation on the Amazon, but he didn't 
like that country. We liked the sound of our own language, so we came back to 
America. We landed in Portland fifty years ago, in the fall of 1871. A real 
estate man told my father the old Josiah West ranch in Clatsop county, then 
owned by Mr. Jewett, was for sale, so he went down to see it. He wanted to buy 
it. I didn't want to move on a farm. I had seen too many farmers' wives. We 
came down to where Seaside is now located. There were three houses here. Mrs. 
Clutri was running a summer hotel where Ben Holladay later built the Seaside 
House. Her father was a Scotchman, Captain Laddie. Her mother was Indian. A 
young man named Clifford Speaden had taken up a homestead where Seaside now 
is. Father paid him fifty dollars for his improvements and relinquishment, and 
built a two-room frame house on the place, into which we moved. He got his 
patent from the government for the forty-seven acres that he had bought of 
Speaden, and bought two fractional quarters of school land, containing about 
sixty acres, that joined him on the north, paying the state a dollar and a 
quarter an acre for it. The Hotel Seaside is built on our homestead. The 
summer after we took up the place we noticed that lots of Portland people came 
here to spend a few weeks, so we thought that some day we might have a summer 
resort here. Among the people who used to come here in the early '70s were the 
Burnsides, Kamms, Failings, Flanderses, Couches, Glisans, Wilsons, Lewises, 
Harveys, Van Schivers, Jacobses, Dr. Jones and other pioneer Portland people. 
Father built a hotel, 'The Grimes Hotel,' near the Necanicum. We set a fine 
table and charged ten dollars a week for room and board, which people thought 
was a big price. During the first years we were here, among our neighbors were 
the Claytons, Evermans, Austins, Steabs, Mulkeys, Matsons, Gearharts, Birds, 
McGuires, Burkes and Bradburys. In 1873 Ben Holladay built the Seaside House.

     "It was quite an undertaking to come to Seaside in those days. You took 
the boat from Portland to Astoria, then took the plunger from Astoria to 
Skipanon, where you changed to a wagon. It was heavy pulling through the sand. 
The road was pretty much all sand except through the woods at Gearhart, where 
it was full of chuckholes and sticky mud. Between the chuckholes and the 
spruce roots the passenger was nearly shaken to pieces while making the trip.

     "They started a town east of the Necanicum and named it Seaside. Father 
platted part of his place and called it Ocean Grove, but now it is part of 
Seaside. He sold lots ninety by one hundred feet for fifty dollars. People 
thought they were being jobbed and robbed. They knew he had paid only a dollar 
and a quarter an acre for it. You couldn't buy those lots now for twenty times 
what father sold them for.

     "Samuel K. Stanley was the manager of Ben Holladay's hotel, the Seaside 
House. His wife died in 1875, leaving four children one of them a baby a few 
months old. I took charge of the baby, who is now Mrs. Frank Howard Laighton. 
Mr. Stanley and I were thrown together a good deal on account of my having 
charge of his baby. On May 27, 1877, we were married. We had one child, a 
daughter, June. My husband was the first postmaster at Seaside. He was paid by 
the amount of stamps he cancelled. At first it amounted to several dollars a 
month, rarely as much as five dollars. Jim Austin succeeded him. When we were 
running the Seaside House, Jim Burke, who still lives here, used to sell us 
lots of elk meat at seven to eight cents a pound. He used to peddle elk, deer 
and bear meat to the campers. In those days, forty years or more ago, there 
was wonderful trout fishing in the Necanicum. Where they catch one now, they 
used to catch a hundred. We bought from J. B. Hunt the old Everman ranch of 
two hundred acres for twelve hundred dollars. It is about half a mile from the 
post office. We lived on the farm twenty-five years till my husband died. We 
had as high as twenty-five hundred laying hens at one time. We sold fryers to 
the hotels for twenty-five cents each and we averaged twenty-five cents a 
dozen for our eggs. I used often to gather as many as seventy-five dozen eggs 
a day in the spring. Raising chickens looks easy, but it is real work. By the 
time you have fought mites, lice, crows, bluejays, skunks, rats, weasels, 
minks, martens, late wet springs and disease, you earn your money."

     Samuel K. Stanley died on the 25th of June, 1900, and was survived by his 
widow for more than a quarter of a century. Their daughter, June, born at 
Seaside, Oregon, is the wife of J. E. Oates, owner of one of the finest 
natatoriums in the Pacific northwest. J. E. Oates is a native of North 
Carolina and a son of Samuel and Elizabeth Oates, the former a cotton planter 
of that state. He attended grammar school in North Carolina to the age of 
thirteen, when he began learning the cotton business, with which he thoroughly 
acquainted himself. After several years spent as a cotton buyer he turned his 
attention to railroad construction work in association with a brother, 
conducting his operations under the name of the Oates Construction Company. 
The brothers were awarded large contracts for railroad construction wont in 
the south and maintained their headquarters at Asheville, North Carolina. The 
panic of 1907, however, caused them to discontinue their operations. In the 
following year J. E. Oates came to Seaside, Oregon, and a few days after his 
arrival he purchased a fine corner lot, two hundred and twenty-four by one 
hundred and twenty-seven feet, at the intersection of Broadway and Promenade. 
In 1914 he constructed a large swimming pool and modern and up-to-date bath 
houses and he has since conducted one of the most splendidly equipped 
natatoriums in this part of the country. He installed new filtering machinery 
in 1927 and the following year added a chlorinator, whereby the water for the 
swimming pools and bath houses is made absolutely pure and safe for public 
use. The new installation will take care of five hundred thousand gallons of 
water. The Oates natatorium lacks no detail of the most modern equipment, 
there being steam cabinets, steam baths, two slides in the plunge, ten showers 
and three hundred and fifty individual dressing rooms, together with a large 
balcony for spectators. Mrs. Oates has proved an able assistant to her husband 
in his business affairs and is an active partner in the natatorium at Seaside. 
Ten store rooms in their building at Broadway and Promenade are being leased.

     Mr. Oates was elected mayor of West Seaside soon after his arrival here 
and for two years ably discharged the duties of the office. His fraternal 
connection is with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and in their 
social intercourse both he and his wife have won many warm friends throughout 
the community in which they make their home.

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