R.D. Hume, a pioneer and early industrialist, built the steamboat Mary D. Hume for his Gold Beach Cannery. The ship was named after his wife. R. D. Hume was a forerunner in the Wedderburn and Gold Beach areas of Ellensburg. By 1881, he had erected Mary D. Hume to support the cannery business and had developed a fish cannery.
Various owners rebuilt her throughout the years, and she has been utilized for a variety of purposes in and around Gold Beach and along the Pacific coast. In the 1970s, it was even the oldest continuously operating commercial vessel.
The Hume spent the first eight years of his career transporting freight between San Francisco and Gold Beach. The Pacific Whaling Co. bought the Mary D. Hume for $25,000 on December 5, 1889, and the Mary D. Hume began her career as an Artic Whaling vessel.
Mary D. Hume soon set off for the Bearing Sea and a ten-year career that made her legendary in the annals of Arctic whaling. Several seamen perished from scurvy, cold, and madness induced by loneliness and isolation during her lengthy Arctic trip.
Her first mission, which lasted from 1890 to 1892, caught 37 whales with a cargo worth $400,000. She then set a record for the longest known whaling journey in Arctic history, lasting six years from 1893 to 1899.
She was sold to the Northwest Fisheries Company in 1900 for service as a cannery tender in Alaskan waters, but four years later she drowned in ice in the Nushagak River, was rescued, and sent to Seattle for repair.
Mary D. Hume was acquired by the American Tug Boat Company on May 20, 1909, and she was converted into an ocean tugboat. Two-story housing was erected somewhere in the early twentieth century.
She continued to serve as a tugboat, a tender for halibut fishing vessels, and a towboat when the whaling boom ended. Her steam engine was replaced with a diesel engine in 1954, and she continued to operate until 1978.
When Mary D. Hume retired, the historical society attempted but failed to turn her into a museum ship. Although Mary D. Hume is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, she is in disrepair and is slowly collapsing into the Gold Beach dirt.