In 1977, when Joe Fritsch’s family bought one of the oldest cabins in the Presidential Streets neighborhood of Cannon Beach, it shifted with the rains on sandy soil and would, he recalled, “shake and rattle in a good storm.”

While placing reinforcements and a new foundation, Fritsch discovered the remains of tree stumps underneath the home’s floorboards. “It was a spruce forest through there,” he said of the neighborhood, where crashing ocean waves provide an unrelenting sonic backdrop. “We were told that the wood was brought down the beach and carried up to the house to build it.”

This and other stories of the cabin’s early days were first told by the Alger family, its sole set of previous owners, thought to have also built some of the neighboring homes. “The family came out, I think it was from Portland, took that arduous journey and would spend several weeks, I suppose, out at their campsite in what we now call Cannon Beach,” Fritsch said.

Early images of the Algers on the cabin site show a camp platform, soon to be replaced by walls of vertical grain fir and an open porch used for cleaning clams and fish. “It’s just classic, in some ways, period design of the time,” Fritsch said, noting the home’s original Craftsman elements and regional details.

A later addition, just as quintessentially North Coast, is what Fritsch calls the crab fireplace. “We went rambling around and accumulated a bunch of rock,” he said.

“One of the rocks, when I hit it with a sledge … it looked like a couple of crab claws. And so we had one kind of big obelisk-shaped rock that we put in the middle over the opening of the fireplace and these things on either side and if somebody points it out to you, it’s sure enough a Dungeness crab sitting there.”

Details like these are memorable for visitors to the cabin, which was featured on the 2022 Cottage and Garden Tour, an annual tour of historic homes presented by the Cannon Beach History Center & Museum.

Another draw to the home is the story of an archaeological dig that once turned up a collection of beads and other antiques.

But for Fritsch, returning to the cabin is simply a comfort. “When I crest the hill, coming in from (U.S. Highway) 26 and start dropping down into Cannon Beach, I can just feel my whole body light up,” he said. “I become a very happy guy. And my daughters — we all have that feeling.”

When family and friends aren’t in town, the cabin often hosts visiting artists, many dropping by local galleries for events and exhibits. Some sculptors have left statues on the windowsill. Plein-air paintings “sit around in a few places,” Fritsch added.

The stories told within its walls bring Fritsch joy. “It’s good to have a building have its doors open and close. There have been honeymoons there and there have been Ph.D. theses written there,” he said. “There’s been all manner of living that’s gone on there through the years.”

It’s in the interest of preserving those moments, he explained that many historic details of the home have been left intact. “Most everybody who walks into that place has the same reaction, which is just, you walk through the front door and it’s like the building is welcoming you,” he said. “It just draws you in.”