TILLAMOOK, Ore. — The Tillamook Rock Lighthouse off the northwest coast of Oregon is for sale for $6.5 million.
The island’s isolation, impossible boat landings and extreme weather as well as the lighthouse crews’ dislike of their months-long stays where they were cold, wet and constantly reminded of their dangerous job, earned the tower the nickname “Terrible Tilly.”
The Oregonian/OregonLive reports investors had paid $50,000 in 1980 to buy the deteriorating lighthouse, Oregon’s only offshore light station. The structure sits a mile from Tillamook Head between Seaside and Cannon Beach.
The owners converted the structure, which has been brutalized for a century and a half by crashing waves, into the Eternity At Sea columbarium. About 30 funeral urns were interred there before the columbarium’s license was not renewed in 1999 by the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board.
The Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, designed to guide ships on their treacherous ocean journey to the Columbia River, played a critical role in the development of the Pacific Northwest and World War II shipbuilding.
The private Tillamook Rock property, which is part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, can only be reached by helicopter with the owners’ permission.
