Wheeler, OR

Wheeler is a small Tillamook County city on the inland side of Nehalem Bay, where the Nehalem River and bay shape the shoreline more than any straight grid. The city incorporated in 1913 and took its name from Coleman H. Wheeler, a Portland lumberman who operated a sawmill in the area before the railroad arrived. Wheeler sits in the northern Tillamook County cluster with Nehalem and Manzanita, close to the coast without being directly on the open ocean.

The working history is timber, rail, river, and bay. The Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad still has a depot in Wheeler, and the city’s waterfront park gives boaters and residents access to Nehalem Bay. Wheeler’s planning documents treat the bay, river, wetlands, and surrounding forest as the physical pieces that need to stay in the same conversation. For bearings, put U.S. 101 and the Nehalem waterway together, then picture a compact Oregon Coast city that grew from a sawmill and railroad town into a place organized around the estuary and the roads along it.