Named for the man who was already here
Toke was a Shoalwater Bay leader of Chinook and Chehalis descent. He wintered near what is now Bay Center and summered out on this point with his wife Suis and their family, and the British trader John Meares wrote him down in 1788 after Toke paddled out to his ship at the mouth of the bay. The town took his name and kept it. George and Charlotte Brown homesteaded fourteen hundred acres here in 1858, farming and trading alongside the Shoalwater people. Their daughter Lizzie and her husband William Kindred put up a farmhouse in 1885 that became an inn and is now the oldest continuously running hotel in Washington. Lizzie went in on the Tokeland Oyster Company when it opened in 1905. For a stretch around the turn of the century this was a genuine resort — steamers, summer people, the whole business. The steamers stopped. What is here now is a marina, a hotel, a casino, a few dozen houses and a road that ends. People drive out for crab and for the quiet, and the drive out is half of it: Highway 105 leaves the cranberry bogs, runs the edge of the bay, and stops at the water.
More things to do in Westport & Grayland
Ocosta Recreation Hall · Reichenberger Farm · Washaway Beach · Bottle Beach State Park · Fisherman's Boardwalk · Furford Cranberry Museum