Marsh's Free Museum

Two red chopsticks, thirty feet long, stand in front of Marsh’s Free Museum at 409 South Pacific Avenue, the stretch of State Route 103 that runs through downtown Long Beach. A senior project produced them in 2010. They are painted with flamework and lettered “Long Beach Peninsula” in English and Chinese, and the museum calls them the World’s Largest Chopsticks. The Lewis & Clark Trail listing places them in the parking lot.

Nothing is charged at the door. Inside, the walls and rafters are hung close. The museum lists a roulette wheel from the Alaskan Gold Rush, life jackets from the Queen Mary, wooden shoes from Holland, gas clothes irons, hair curler irons, oil lamps, old vacuum cleaners, farm equipment, rifles, swords, drums, spears and music makers, along with snake skins, beehives and Soviet military medals. In 2004 the Chinook Observer added Theda Bara’s headband, a set of Civil War leg irons, and a spittoon from the Silver Dollar Saloon in Alder Gulch, Nev.

The taxidermy runs to a yak, a lioness, a Russian boar and what the museum lists as a Seca, with a two-headed calf, an eight-legged lamb, a one-eyed lamb, a two-headed pig, and a shark mounted mid-swim. A self-playing violin sits among them. A human skeleton stands nearby. The museum says it holds three shrunken heads, a rare trio on the West Coast. A 2024 Observer profile mentioned only one, “(supposedly) real.” The glass fishing floats, which the museum calls America’s largest collection, include one as large as a beach ball.

Coin machines line the aisles: a peep show, mechanical baseball, a fortune teller, and a romance tester called the Passion Factor. A visitor takes a seat at the Passion Factor and learns whether they are frigid, lovable, wild, sexy or uncontrollable. In 2004 the peep shows cost a nickel, and bubble shells sold two for a nickel. That year every customer received a free seashell fixed to a small card, about 130,000 a year by the Observer’s count. The museum now puts the figure at more than 1,000,000. The paper noted that the shells come from Mexico and the Philippines, because the surf outside the back door pounds local shells to pieces.

Much of the floor is a gift shop. It stocks apparel, jewelry, rocks and fossils, starfish and coral, pirate coins, and figurines of elephants, cats, bats and turtles. On October 4, 2026, the museum announced a new shipment of medieval, gladiator and Roman-style helmets.

Jake behind glass

At the center of it all is Jake the Alligator Man. The Observer described him in 2004 as what “appears to be an ossified dwarf whose skin has turned a putrid black. From the waist down, Jake is an alligator, with scales and tail.” He perches in a glass case flanked by Alligator Man merchandise. That year the case carried a sign: “We have very little history on Jake.” The museum counts more than 30,000 postcards of him sold, and he has his own bumper sticker. The Weekly World News once ran his story, which included an escape from captivity, a murder, and the birth of an alligator baby.

The tales told off the page run further. Some folks claim he was a valet in a New Orleans whorehouse. Others say he was a sideshow freak who smoked cigars and could nod yes or no to simple questions. In 2004 a retired couple from Kelso, who drove down every summer to see him, said they remembered him alive and nodding in a Texas carnival. The museum and the Observer both name a likelier maker: Homer Tate, who built gaffs for the sideshow circuit and was prolific in the 1940s and ‘50s. The 2024 Observer piece also passed on a rumor that Jake, now fragile, sends a double, “Fake Jake,” to make his public appearances. That double is said to turn up at local birthday and cocktail parties in a red smoking jacket, with one of his lady friends on his arm.

A missing bride, autumn 2026

For years Long Beach held a birthday for Jake. By the museum’s account, residents chose a local maiden to be his bride through a talent show, and a car show drew custom cars and hot rods. The Observer recalled followers in outlandish regalia at his “Annual 75th Birthday Celebration” and at periodic weddings. The event ran through 2019, and the COVID shutdown stopped it after that.

It returned on September 25, 2026, at the Elks Lodge on Pacific Avenue North, billed as Jake’s 75th birthday. The program was an adults-only burlesque murder mystery, “Jake and the Case of the Missing Bride,” written and directed by Ashley Mundel of 503 Marquee Stagehouse & Cocktails in Astoria. In the plot, the bride had vanished along with her famous panties, “rumored to be a prized trophy she won in a competition.” B&D’s Food Hut catered the dinner, and the Skamokawa Swamp Opera played. A silent auction offered local art, and part of the proceeds went to Peninsula Poverty Response.

The story carried into October as the first Haunted Peninsula. The museum’s lore holds that the bride disappeared in 2019 and that her restless spirit now returns each October to wander the coast in search of Jake. Businesses up and down the peninsula have decorated for her, including Chico’s Pizza, B&D’s Food Hut, Fireside Inn, Captain Bob’s Chowder Sisters, Ilwaco Cider Company, Tre-Fin, Long Beach Candy Company, Eradipest and Marsh’s itself. Homes in Seaview, Ilwaco, Long Beach and Ocean Park, one of them called the Bloomer Estates Mansion, compete for Best Decorated Residence. Visitors can vote online for business and residence and follow a scavenger hunt for hidden items, collecting clues toward prizes from Marsh’s.

On October 30 the gathering moves to Morehead Park in Ocean Park for a talent show and costume contest, with a market of local vendors and makers. There the decorating winners will be named. Legend has it, the museum says, that because the bride was chosen through a talent show, only another one will keep her spirit at peace until the following Halloween. On Halloween night, at the same park, the story ends with what the museum calls the official burial of Jake’s wife.

Rutabagas, a shipwreck, and bar tabs on the wall

The family tells the founding through David Marsh, the founder’s grandson. In his account, Wellington Marsh Sr. came to Washington from North Dakota in 1921 after going broke farming rutabagas. He opened an ice cream and candy shop in Long Beach, then a tavern.

On a foggy evening in 1930, the 300-foot passenger steamer Admiral Benson ran aground on Peacock Spit near the mouth of the Columbia, carrying 39 passengers and 65 crew. After three days she could not be refloated. With a storm coming, the company went ashore. The captain, C.C. Graham, stayed aboard alone. The storm began breaking up the ship the next day. Six days later she was declared unsalvageable, and Graham followed his crew to the beach that would later be named Benson Beach.

The wreck drew crowds for days, and Wellington put up a temporary burger stand on the sand nearby. That stand led to a restaurant and bar. It was still the Depression, and patrons who could not pay their tabs brought in items of interest, either as payment or as a reminder of what they owed. Wellington hung the items on the wall. He opened the museum proper in 1935, across the street from the present building, beside the world’s largest frying pan and the world’s largest razor clam. One family photograph shows him spread-eagled in front of the pan to show its size.

The Observer’s 2024 profile gives a different start. It names the founder Wellington W. Marsh, called “W” by his friends, and gives his dates as 1895 to 2004. He first came from North Dakota to visit his grandmother, Elizabeth MacArthur, who owned beach cabins on the ground where the museum stands today. In 1926 he and his wife, Harriet, known as Hattie, settled on the peninsula for good and began collecting in earnest. They opened Marsh’s Café and a first store, Marsh’s Seashell Factory and Antique Shop. He sold oysters on the side. The couple crossed the country buying shells and antiques in a bus they called The Old Blue Bonnet. He was a Navy veteran of the First World War, and he held clam fries outside the museum in the giant frying pan.

Mrs. Marsh turns the car around

How Jake reached Long Beach also depends on the teller. The 2004 Observer reported that a Long Beach antiques dealer, Ray Pryor, bought him at auction when Whitney’s Museum in San Francisco closed in 1965. Wellington Marsh Jr.’s wife, Marian, told the paper that her husband “didn’t want to pay $750 for Jake but I talked him into it.” The family’s own history dates the purchase to 1968, for the same $750. It traces Jake to the Cliff House in San Francisco and says the seller was a dealer in Long Beach, California, who got him after the Cliff House burned. In this version the Marshes drove off at the price, and Mrs. Marsh made her husband turn around and go back. The 2024 Observer put the price at $700, paid in the mid-1960s directly to the Cliff House Museum. In 2017 the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in Ilwaco counted Jake’s arrival among the changes of the 1960s on the peninsula.

In 1972 the Marshes built the present building and moved the collection across the street. The razor clam and the frying pan stayed where they were. The 2004 Observer gave 1977 as the year Wellington Sr. died and 1995 for Wellington Jr. The family history says the founder “may have passed in 1978.”

The museum has stayed in the family. It has passed to David’s niece Mandy, who grew up in the store, and her cousin Shannon. Jon Marsh got his start there in 1978. In the summer of 2024 he opened a museum of his own across the street at 408 Pacific Avenue, devoted to cannabis and hemp.

“If grandpa and dad walked in today, they would like this place,” David Marsh said in 2004. “See, they loved being entertained, they loved the old razzmatazz. They were showmen and businessmen.”