The 759th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron activated at Naselle on November 27, 1950, and immediately began scanning the skies with AN/FPS-3 long-range search radar and AN/FPS-5 height-finder radar. The station replaced two temporary sites in the Lashup Radar Network -- Fort Stevens in Oregon and Pacific Beach in Washington -- that had been stopgaps since September. Naselle's mission was Ground-Control Intercept: when radar operators spotted an unidentified aircraft, they vectored interceptor fighters toward the contact. The radars sat on the mountaintop while support facilities spread across the base below, a split arrangement dictated by the need for unobstructed radar coverage and the reality that people need to live somewhere flatter. From that peak, the AN/FPS-3 could sweep the ocean approaches for hundreds of miles, watching for bombers that everyone hoped would never come.

Cold War radar technology evolved relentlessly, and Naselle's equipment turned over with it. An AN/FPS-8 search radar arrived in 1955, later converted and redesignated as an AN/GPS-3. By 1958, the squadron was operating an AN/FPS-20 search radar alongside AN/FPS-6 and AN/FPS-6A height-finders -- a significant upgrade that extended range and accuracy. In 1962, the AN/FPS-20 was upgraded again, becoming an AN/FPS-67. Each new designation represented a leap in capability: better resolution, longer range, improved ability to distinguish real threats from weather clutter and electronic noise. In February 1960, Naselle joined the Semi Automatic Ground Environment -- SAGE -- the massive computer-driven air defense system that linked radar stations across the continent. The station fed its data to Direction Center DC-12 at McChord Air Force Base, where computers and human operators analyzed contacts around the clock to determine whether approaching aircraft were friendly or hostile.

The 759th was redesignated as the 759th Radar Squadron in April 1960 and continued its watch through the early 1960s, adding an AN/FPS-26A height-finder in 1965 even as the strategic landscape shifted beneath it. Intercontinental ballistic missiles had overtaken bombers as the primary Soviet threat, and a radar station designed to spot aircraft could do nothing about a missile arcing through the upper atmosphere. Budget reductions caught up with Naselle on June 30, 1966. The squadron was inactivated, the screens went dark, and sixteen years of continuous surveillance ended. The station had served under five different command assignments -- from the 505th Aircraft Control and Warning Group in 1951 through the 25th Air Division at closure -- reflecting the constant reorganization that characterized Cold War air defense as threats evolved faster than bureaucracies could settle.

The mountaintop radar site found a second life as a commercial transmitter installation, its elevation and cleared sight lines still valuable even after the military left. The base facilities at the foot of the mountain took a more unexpected turn: they became Naselle Youth Camp, a state-operated forestry camp for juvenile offenders. Some of the original Air Force buildings still stand within the camp's grounds, repurposed structures that once housed men scanning for Soviet bombers now sheltering a very different kind of institution. The transformation captures something essential about these Cold War outposts -- they were built with urgency, maintained with discipline, and abandoned when strategy shifted, leaving behind infrastructure that rural communities found ways to reuse. The mountain still commands a view of the surrounding forests and the distant Pacific, the same vantage that made it valuable to the Air Defense Command in 1950.