Westport Maritime Museum

Fabulous local maritime museum with very friendly and welcoming staff. Great exhibits on marine creatures and archaeology at kid level and ideal for instructing youngsters on the oceans and their wonders. Don't miss the huge whale skeletons in the adjoining glass-fronted buildings. Gem of the collection is the massive and awesome, French-made, first order Fresnel lighthouse lamp salvaged from the famous and now abandoned Destruction Island lighthouse. This magnificent piece of world-beating French high-tech optical machinery (circa 1890), illuminated and turning, gets its own well-deserved building and is surrounded with fascinating maps, charts, photos, and artifact displays evoking the terrestrial and marine history of Westport and surrounding communities in Western Washington. Go right now and wonder at what the French alone in that era could successively build, export, and install at great distances from the precision workshops constructing the very finest optical machines on the planet.