The building carries a family story in its walls. Albert W. Ferguson designed and built Astoria's first city hall in 1878, establishing himself as one of the town's key builders during its early growth. When the city outgrew that structure, Ferguson's son carried on the tradition - the firm of Ferguson & Houston constructed the replacement at 16th and Exchange streets, though architect Emil Schacht provided the design. Construction began in 1904, and the finished building was larger and more modern than its predecessor, reflecting Astoria's ambitions at the turn of the century. The city packed everything into it: all municipal offices and the city library shared the two-story space. It served that purpose for thirty-four years, anchoring a neighborhood that eventually felt too far from Astoria's commercial center.

When city offices relocated downtown at the end of March 1939, the building entered a strange, nomadic period. The State of Oregon used it as an annex to a newly built armory next door during the 1940s. Then the United Service Organizations took it over as a local headquarters - a gathering place for servicemen during the postwar years. When the USO moved out in 1960, the building sat vacant for the first time in its existence. Three years of emptiness followed before the Columbia River Maritime Museum transformed it into its inaugural home in August 1963. For nearly two decades, visitors walked through rooms that had once held city council meetings to examine the maritime heritage of the Columbia River. The museum outgrew the space and moved to purpose-built quarters on the riverfront in 1982, leaving the old city hall vacant once more.

The Clatsop County Historical Society saw something worth saving. In 1980, its members voted to purchase the old city hall and convert it into a heritage museum - a place where Astoria's many pasts could be gathered under one roof. The purchase was completed and the museum opened in 1985. Between 1987 and 1988, the society undertook both interior renovation and exterior restoration, funded by private grants and donations. The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department lists the building as "Astoria City Hall (Old)" to distinguish it from the current city hall, a bureaucratic parenthetical that captures something essential: this building matters enough to require clarification. It sits on the National Register of Historic Places, officially recognized not just for what it is but for what it has been - a structure that kept finding reasons to remain standing when demolition would have been easier.

Astoria climbs the hills above the Columbia's mouth, its grid of streets tilting upward from the waterfront toward the forested ridgeline. The old city hall sits within this fabric at 16th and Exchange, part of a historic district where the architecture tells the story of a town that was once the most important port in Oregon. From the air, Astoria reads as a narrow strip of development wedged between river and hills, the Astoria-Megler Bridge stretching improbably across the Columbia to Washington. The old city hall is modest by comparison - a two-story building easy to miss among the Victorian houses and commercial structures nearby. But modesty is part of its character. It never aspired to be a landmark. It simply refused to go away.