Ben Holladay, the transportation baron who started Seaside as a resort
Photo: W. F. Bailey The Pacific Monthly Publishing Co, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ben Holladay was born in Kentucky in 1819 and made his first fortune hauling freight and running stagecoaches in the West. By the early 1860s his Overland Stage Line carried mail and passengers across much of the country, and newspapers called him the Stagecoach King. He sold the line to Wells Fargo in 1866, shortly before the transcontinental railroad made stagecoaches obsolete.
He then turned to Oregon, where he bought steamship lines and gained control of the Oregon and California Railroad, which was building south from Portland through the Willamette Valley. His methods, including spending heavily to influence the legislature, made him powerful and widely disliked.
The Seaside House
In the early 1870s Holladay built a resort hotel on the Necanicum River near the beach in Clatsop County and called it the Seaside House. Guests arrived by steamer to Astoria and then by stage or wagon. The name stuck to the settlement that grew around it, and Seaside was incorporated in 1899.
Holladay’s plans for the coast were large. He hoped to extend rail service there and promote the area to Portland’s wealthy families. The hotel offered racing, hunting and fine dining.
The fall
The financial panic of 1873 hit his business hard, and his German bondholders eventually forced him out of the railroad in the mid-1870s. He spent his last years in Portland tied up in lawsuits and died there in 1887, far poorer than at his peak.
The Seaside House burned in the 1890s. But the idea of Seaside as a place Portlanders went to relax by the ocean outlasted him, and it still defines the town.
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