Commercial Street in downtown Astoria, Oregon, with the former Hotel Astoria
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The Van Dusens of Astoria and their claim to Oregon’s oldest business

ByJoel Koskinen

Photo: Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

If you buy a Pepsi anywhere in Clatsop County, you are buying it from the Van Dusens. That small fact connects a modern soft drink route to one of the longest family business histories in the Pacific Northwest, and to a claim the family has carried since 2011: that Van Dusen Companies of Astoria is the oldest business in Oregon.

The claim got a closer look this summer, when Oregonian/OregonLive columnist Samantha Swindler set out to answer a question that comes up among history buffs. What is the oldest business founded in the Oregon Territory that has never stopped operating? Her answer, after a trip to Astoria, was that it depends on how you define a business. But no one, she concluded, has operated a business continuously in the territory longer than the Van Dusen family.

Shelves instead of a counter

The story begins in 1847, when Adam and Caroline Van Dusen left Michigan for Oregon Territory. After a stop in Oregon City, they reached Astoria in 1848. Caroline’s diary describes a hard first winter on a donation land claim. By the spring of 1849 the family had moved closer to town, and Adam opened a mercantile store, A. Van Dusen & Co.

According to Swindler’s reporting, the store set itself apart from the established Hudson’s Bay Company post by displaying goods on shelves, a new idea at the time. A family history published by the Clatsop County Historical Society in 1982 says Adam’s son, Brenham, took over the store while his father ran an insurance office upstairs.

Ads for the store ran in the Daily Astorian until 1889. By 1896 the city directory listed Van Dusen & Co. as a real estate, insurance and commission office at 119 11th St.

The bottling years

The modern company took shape after World War II. Lloyd Fulton Van Dusen, the fourth generation, came home from the service and, in 1947, bought Kendall’s Bottling Works with his brother, renaming it Van Dusen Beverage. The family ran the insurance and bottling businesses side by side until 1973, when it sold Van Dusen Insurance and focused on the Pepsi plant.

Today the company has 19 employees. Like many small bottlers, it no longer fills bottles in Astoria. Its drinks are mostly produced at cooperative plants in Mt. Angel and in Tumwater, Washington, then distributed from Astoria across Clatsop County and parts of Columbia County. The company holds local rights for Pepsi products, Dr Pepper and its own Crystal Cascade water.

Willis Van Dusen Sr., the fifth generation, calls it “the smallest Pepsi bottler in the world.” He told the Oregonian he is optimistic: “Our little business is pretty well protected. I think the future is really bright.”

A mayor and a historical society

Willis Van Dusen Sr. is a familiar name in Astoria for reasons beyond soda. He served 30 years on the City Council, 24 of them as mayor.

He was mayor during Astoria’s 2011 bicentennial, which is when the family began calling itself Oregon’s oldest business. He told the Oregonian he had assumed the family lost the title in 1973, when it got out of insurance. Historical society researchers looked into it and told him that the same family, in the same place, had been in business without a break.

Mac Burns, executive director of the Clatsop County Historical Society, backs that up. “The Van Dusen family has been in Astoria and doing business since the 1840s,” he told the Oregonian. “I am hard pressed to find a similar family doing business continuously in the same place.”

Other contenders

The family does have competition for the title, depending on the definition. The Columbia River Bar Pilots trace their licensing to 1846. Willamette University in Salem was founded in 1842. The Oregonian itself began publishing in 1850 and may be the oldest business still producing the same product.

Houses, a mansion and a pier

The sixth generation, siblings Willis Van Dusen Jr. and Trudy Van Dusen, now run the business with their father. The family has also put money into Astoria’s old buildings. Van Dusen House, a Victorian the family built in 1884 and sold in the 1940s, was bought back in 2021 and restored as a vacation rental. The Čitović Mansion, an 1888 Queen Anne, has become a wedding venue with lodging upstairs. In 2023 the family bought Van Dusen Pier, a waterfront property on Youngs Bay.

That makes 177 years in the same town, through fur, salmon, timber and tourism. The products have changed several times. The family name on the door has not.

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