A pattern of pilings is all that remains from the sawmills and canneries that once lined the banks of the Siletz River at the site of Kernville, founded in 1886, a few years after the Coast Reservation was opened to white settlement. Daniel Kern came from Portland to establish a cannery here, the first one south of the Columbia, bringing Chinese workers from Astoria. His brother John became the first postmaster in what was to become Lincoln County, setting up the post in one of the cannery buildings. But the salmon runs in the Siletz proved insufficient to keep the canneries busy for long. The entire settlement was finally abandoned in the early 1900s when it was bypassed by a new highway bridge to the west.