Congress approved the money in 1919. Construction began in 1921. The submarine and destroyer base on Tongue Point was finished by 1924. And then nobody came. The military had shrunk after World War I, and the brand-new installation on this rocky peninsula jutting into the Columbia River east of Astoria sat unused - a monument to timing so bad it bordered on comedy. It would take another world war, two decades later, to give Tongue Point a reason to exist. When that war ended, the base found yet another purpose: parking lot for a fleet of ships nobody needed anymore.
Tongue Point seemed like an obvious choice for a naval installation. The peninsula extends into the Columbia River at a natural narrowing, offering deep water and sheltered anchorage just miles from the Pacific. Congress authorized a submarine and destroyer base there in 1919, riding the momentum of wartime military spending. But by the time workers finished driving the last pilings in 1924, the Great War's urgency had dissolved into peacetime budget cuts. The completed base stood empty. For fifteen years, the hangars and docks waited, maintained but purposeless, while the Columbia River fog rolled through facilities designed for vessels that never arrived.
World War II finally gave Tongue Point its mission. Redesignated as a Naval Air Station in the late 1930s, the base broke ground again in 1939, though construction delays pushed completion to 1943. New hangars and ordnance depots rose on the peninsula, and PBY Catalina seaplanes - those ungainly, dependable flying boats - began launching from the Columbia's surface to patrol the coastline for Japanese submarines. The threat was real: in June 1942, the Japanese submarine I-25 had shelled nearby Fort Stevens. Tongue Point also served as a commissioning yard for escort aircraft carriers built in Portland-area shipyards, sending the small flattops downriver and out to the Pacific war. A naval communications intercept station operated quietly on the point, listening to enemy transmissions while the Catalinas droned overhead.
Peace brought a different kind of fleet to Tongue Point. After 1945, the air station shut down, and the base transformed into an anchorage for the National Defense Reserve Fleet - rows of Liberty ships and other wartime vessels tied up gunwale to gunwale, preserved in case another conflict required them. The mothball fleet at Astoria became one of several such anchorages along America's coasts, administered by predecessors of the Maritime Administration. By 1965, photographs showed the ships still packed along the Columbia's banks, their gray hulls streaked with rust, riding the river's current in quiet formation. They were insurance policies, built in frantic wartime shipyards and then parked indefinitely. Most would eventually be scrapped or sunk as artificial reefs, their usefulness measured more by the wars they never had to fight.
In 1962, the Navy transferred Tongue Point to the General Services Administration, ending decades of military control. The transformation that followed was unexpected. By 1965, one of the nation's first Job Corps centers opened on the former base, repurposing military barracks and training facilities for young Americans learning trades. Clatsop Community College established its Marine and Environmental Research and Training Station on the point, turning a place built for war into a place built for education. The Coast Guard, which had operated a lighthouse on Tongue Point since 1876 and a buoy tender port since 1939, remained the one constant through all the changes. In 2022, the Coast Guard expanded its presence, awarding a contract for a fixed pier and floating docks to accommodate fast response cutters - bringing military vessels back to the peninsula for the first time in decades.
Located at 46.20°N, 123.77°W on the Columbia River, approximately 3 miles east of Astoria, Oregon. From altitude, Tongue Point is clearly visible as a narrow peninsula extending northward into the Columbia. The point creates a distinctive profile against the wide river channel. Look for the remaining military-era structures and dock facilities. Astoria Regional Airport (KAST) is approximately 6 miles to the west in Warrenton. The Columbia River Bar, one of the most dangerous river entrances in the world, lies to the west where the river meets the Pacific. The Astoria-Megler Bridge is visible crossing the Columbia to Washington.