John West, a native of Scotland born in 1809, immigrated to Quebec, married, started a family, and apprenticed as a millwright before leaving in 1849 to seek gold in California. After finding little gold, he arrived in Astoria in 1850 and used his millwright skills on the lower Columbia River. In 1853, he and his wife Margaret took up a 640-acre Donation Land Claim near this spot, where he soon began building a water-powered sawmill. He later built a steam-powered sawmill in the early 1860s, and by 1868 he was exporting lumber to Australia. The community of Westport grew around his sawmill on that claim, and his name remained attached both to Westport and to a large seafood processor and distributor. West also ran a general store and post office, built and managed a salmon cannery, improved canning machinery, and exported canned salmon around the world. From as early as 1857 he exported salted salmon packed in barrels to California, from where it was shipped around Cape Horn to East Coast ports and then to Great Britain. In 1868, he and several partners founded the Westport Cannery, the first on the Oregon shore of the Columbia River, and during the 1873 season it packed 22,000 cases of salmon and won a gold medal from the Oregon Agricultural Society that October. West invented an automated can-filling machine and was the first on the lower Columbia River to use salmon waste for oil and fishmeal by-products, while also experimenting with canning beef, mutton, and blackberries during the salmon off-season. Salmon canning on the Columbia peaked in the 1880s, and West's canned-food brand survived as John West Foods Ltd. of Liverpool, England. The West family sold the mill in the early 1900s, and the Westport Lumber Company continued production there until February 1956, when a scarcity of logs of sufficient size made operation uneconomical. John West died in 1888 at age 79 and is buried in the West family plot at the Westport Cemetery.