Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park History

Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park is set on a wide hard-sand beach where the Copalis River empties into the Pacific Ocean. The park’s waters and sands conceal evidence of a massive earthquake that transformed the surrounding landscape.

Building a Landscape Slowly and Quickly

Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park faces the Pacific Ocean at North America’s “active margin,” where the ocean-floor Juan de Fuca tectonic plate slowly sinks beneath the continent, sliding at a rate of about 13 feet per century in the plate’s subduction zone. Friction between the two plates can cause them to become temporarily stuck together. When this occurs, the upper, continental plate is bent downwards along its outer edge, thickening inland.  Eventually, the strain is violently released as an earthquake: the upper plate snaps west towards its normal shape and the overlying land instantaneously drops, sometimes sinking below the tide line. Geologic evidence suggests that this has occurred at least seven times in the last 3,500 years along the Washington coast, a return interval of 400-600 years.

An 1892 government survey shows the location of the coastline in today’s Griffith-Priday Ocean State Park without the signature sand spit that today parallels the Copalis River for nearly two miles at its mouth. That is not an error. Since the survey, the coast has accumulated sediment, adding new land to the shoreline, a process called accretion. Oceanographic studies have shown that sediment carried to the coast by rivers or eroded from bluffs on the water’s edge is transported parallel to the shore by strong coastal currents during the winter season. In the summer, waves transport the sediment up the face of the shore, extending the land toward the sea. When jetties were built at the mouth of Grays Harbor to the south in the early 20th century, the rate of accretion at today’s Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park doubled, as the transport of sediments along the shore changed.

Indigenous Land

The park lies within the traditional territory of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Quinault Indian Nation and Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation.

For thousands of years the lands and waters of the Pacific Ocean coast and the Copalis River have provided a habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. Oral traditions of the tribes include references to landscape-level changes to the area with an earthquake and a giant tsunami over 300 years ago. Ethnologists have estimated that at least 5,000 people made their homes on the coast of today’s Washington at the time.

Archaeologists have noted that the few coastal sites they have investigated with shell middens or hearths older than 300 years are uniformly buried under at least three feet of tidal mud that was likely deposited by a devastating tsunami.

Some local tribes ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Quinault River in July 1855, keeping rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the ocean beaches of today’s Griffith-Priday Ocean State Park.

Other local tribes refused to accept the conditions proposed by Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens at the Chehalis River Treaty Council in February 1855. Subsequently, title to the land was relinquished to the US federal government and the Chehalis Reservation was established by executive order of Secretary of the Interior J. P. Usher on July 8, 1864.

After government surveys were completed in 1892, the land in today’s park passed into private ownership with Cash Entry patents in 1894 to Mary J Henninger and Carl Schopper, and later, Homestead Entry patents to William Hunter (1899) and Ben Grigsby (1901), after they had built homes and resided on the land to meet the law’s requirements to “prove up” their claims.

The Sea Otter Hunters

The impetus for much of the initial European and American entry into today’s Washington was the desire for the luxurious and costly fur of Enhydra lutris, the sea otter. Initially, the furs were obtained almost exclusively by trading with local Indigenous people, exchanging manufactured items for the furs.

By the 1880s, American colonizers actively hunted sea otters along the beach in today’s Griffiths-Priday State Park. According to naturalist Victor B. Scheffer, who interviewed surviving sea otter hunters in the 1930s, the hunting was done from log “shooting derricks,” or stands. The largest were made of four logs at least one foot thick and 60 feet long, bolted together with a platform on top. The stands stood on the sand until taken down by the effects of a winter storm. According to Scheffer:

"The hunters worked in pairs, one man on lookout and the other “running the beach” to recover dead or wounded animals. When the lookout spied an otter within range, he fired at it with a heavy Sharps rifle … To establish ownership of an otter found dead, each hunter identified his bullets with a private mark. Bitter disputes would arise between hunters over the possession of a stranded, freshly wounded animal not carrying a bullet."

By 1903, sea otters had been hunted to the edge of extinction in local waters. From about 1911 to 1969, sea otters were completely absent from Washington waters. In 1969 and 1970, 59 sea otters were reintroduced to the Washington coast from Amchitka Island, Alaska.  By 2000, that population had increased to over 500, and by the 2020s the population was estimated to be around 2,000.

In 1989, a plaque was placed in Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park commemorating “the only remaining location known to have been used by the sea otter hunters.”

Judge Griffiths’ “Ocean Playground”

Austin and Margaret Griffiths moved to Grays Harbor County in 1889, where the 26-year-old Austin began a law practice. Enamored with the beauty of the coastline, he purchased Carl Schopper’s recently patented property with a $300 mortgage in September 1894, and it became a personal and family retreat, even after the Griffiths moved to Seattle in 1897. Later, Griffiths purchased the Grigsby homestead property to enlarge his “ocean playground.” Griffiths was elected to the Seattle City Council and School Board and served as a Superior Court Judge from 1921-1929. He engaged with many charitable organizations, including the Seattle Playground Association and YMCA.

Making a Park

On July 19, 1958, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) agreed to accept a donation of 128 acres near the mouth of the Copalis River under the terms of the last will and testament of Judge Austin E. Griffiths, who had passed away in July 1952.

Judge Griffiths’ will stipulated that the land “shall be set apart and used by the State of Washington as an ocean playground and park for the pleasure of its people and all lawful visitors forever.” He also directed that the park be named Griffiths-Priday Ocean Park, in remembrance of his wife Ella Montgomery Griffiths and his foster parents Philip and Ann Priday, with whom he had emigrated from England to the United States in 1872.

The park remained undeveloped for many years, as the property lacked a good point for public access and day-use facilities. In May 1974, the WSPRC received a $192,175 matching grant from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (which uses revenue from offshore oil and gas leases to support the acquisition and development of recreation and natural areas), earmarked to “guarantee access to the public beach on the seaward side of the Copalis River, benefitting this and succeeding generations of Washington recreationists.”

Three properties were purchased, and basic access and day-use facilities were developed. Griffiths-Priday Ocean State Park was dedicated on May 17, 1986.

Geology Sleuths

By the 1980s, geologists theorized that subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate had the potential to generate giant earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, but there was no historical record of such a quake, as there was in places such as Alaska, Chile or Japan. According to USGS Paleogeologist Brian Atwater, “there was plenty of skepticism out there among geophysicists that the zone really was capable of doing this stuff.”

Atwater began surveying the Washington coast for evidence of a very large historic earthquake. In 1986, he unearthed plants that had been suddenly buried by a large quantity of sand, possibly deposited by an earthquake-generated tsunami. In 1987, he returned with dendrochronologist David Yamaguchi and found groves of dead western red-cedar trees, “ghost forests,” standing in saltwater tidal estuaries. Cedar trees cannot grow in saltwater. Atwater and Yamaguchi hypothesized that the groves must have been killed when their landscape dropped following an earthquake, flooding them with salty water. Wood samples analyzed by Yamaguchi showed that the trees had died in the winter of 1700. Over time, Atwater, Yamaguchi and other researchers found similar evidence at sites hundreds of miles up and down the coast, indicating a very large earthquake had occurred there before written records were kept.

In 1996, Kenji Satake of the Geological Survey of Japan correlated Atwater’s information with records from Japanese coastal villages that detailed a 16-foot tsunami, which had caused major damage on January 26, 1700. The giant wave had taken villagers by surprise, as there had been no seismic activity in that region prior to its arrival.

Tsunami waves generated by an 8.7-9.2 magnitude subduction zone earthquake near the Washington coast would have been capable of traveling across the entire Pacific Ocean within 10 hours, moving at about the same speed as a commercial airline flight. Arriving at Japan, observers would have experienced a large tsunami capable of washing away buildings and other property.

One of the ghost forests surveyed by Atwater and Yamaguchi is located a short distance up the Copalis River estuary from the beach at Griffiths-Priday State Park. In 2010, the non-profit Cascade Land Conservancy (now Forterra) brokered a purchase of 121 acres of the original William Hunter homestead including the Copalis ghost forest. The unique record of the massive earthquake of 1700 was added to Griffiths-Priday State Park on December 29, 2010.