Uppertown Firefighters Museum

A museum housed in a building originally constructed in 1896 as part of the North Pacific Brewery, later converted to Uppertown Fire Station No. 2 in 1928. Operated by the Clatsop County Historical Society.

The building that houses the Uppertown Firefighters Museum at 2968 Marine Drive in Astoria has served three distinct purposes across more than a century, each chapter leaving its own mark on the structure. Designed by renowned Portland architect Emil Schacht, the building was constructed in 1896 as part of the North Pacific Brewery, one of several breweries that thrived in Astoria's bustling waterfront economy during the late nineteenth century. When Prohibition shuttered the brewery in 1915, the building sat vacant for several years before the city of Astoria acquired it in 1920. After conversion work, it reopened in 1928 as Uppertown Fire Station No. 2, serving the city's fire department for over three decades until a new Headquarters Station was built directly behind it in 1960, rendering the old station redundant.

The building's most enduring ghost dates to its years as an active fire station. According to accounts passed down through generations of Astoria firefighters, a fireman who was prone to sleepwalking fell to his death inside the building sometime during the 1920s. The exact circumstances of the fall and the identity of the firefighter have been lost to time, but his presence has not. Firefighters who bunked in the station during the decades that followed reported waking to find the apparition of a man in firefighting gear standing over them as they slept, watching silently before fading from view. The encounters were unnerving enough that some firefighters reportedly requested transfers to other stations rather than continue sleeping in a building where a dead colleague might appear at their bedside.

Beyond the sleepwalking fireman, the building generates a steady stream of unexplained phenomena. Lockers rattle on their own, their metal doors clanging as though being slammed by invisible hands. Staff and visitors to the museum report hearing disembodied footsteps on the third floor, heavy boot-falls that sound exactly like someone walking across the old wooden floors. When anyone goes upstairs to investigate, the footsteps stop and no one is ever found. Eerie noises echo through the building at irregular intervals, particularly in the areas that once served as sleeping quarters for the firefighters.

The building was reopened as the Uppertown Firefighters Museum in 1990, marking 120 years since the establishment of Astoria's first volunteer fire department. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum now houses an impressive collection of vintage and antique firefighting equipment spanning nearly a century of service, including an 1876 LaFrance Hook and Ladder Truck, a 1911 LaFrance Chemical Wagon, a 1921 Stutz Pumper, and a 1945 Mack Pumper Engine. The collection includes hand-pulled, horse-drawn, and motorized fire engines alongside firefighting memorabilia and historical photographs.

The museum operates on a limited seasonal schedule, open only on Saturdays from noon to three during the summer months of June through September, with free admission and donations accepted. Its brief operating hours mean that most paranormal activity goes unwitnessed by the public, occurring in the quiet stretches when the old brewery-turned-firehouse-turned-museum stands empty. But the stories persist among locals and paranormal enthusiasts, and the Uppertown Firefighters Museum remains one of three locations most frequently cited in accounts of haunted Astoria, alongside the Liberty Theatre and the Flavel House Museum.