The jam on Broadway started in a strawberry field
Oregon Hill Farms has cooked in St. Helens since 1987. The jars are in Seaside shops. The pails are wholesale. Five Oregon couples bought the kitchen in 2024.
Cove Tales · May 28, 2026 · 2 min read
You can buy Oregon Hill Farms without going to Oregon Hill. In Seaside the jars sit at Cotton Club on Broadway, at the Heron’s Nest inside Pig ’n Pancake, at Oregon and More, at Oregon Marketplace on Roosevelt, at the liquor store on Avenue H. The kitchen is in St. Helens, 32861 Pittsburg Road, and has been since 1987, when the place was still a farm people remember for strawberries.
Journey here
Tom and Carmen McMahon ran it for years as a co-packer and a brand. Locals still talk about picking berries in those fields before the kettles took over. In May 2024 five Oregon couples bought the company: Ty and Tammie Baxter, Dave and Kathy Innocenti, Randy and Illine May, Brad and Elisa Rakes, David and Mindy Sass. Ty Baxter, the about page says, spent twenty years in the Air Force on bombers and drones, then eighteen as a contractor. They bought a jam kitchen. The mission they published is unromantic and useful: exceptional quality in processing and packaging their own line and other people’s labels.
A normal day
Retail is marionberry and the rest of the Northwest fruit drawer — jams, syrups, apple butters, barbecue sauces, bar mixers, honey. Wholesale is the same recipes in ½-gallon jugs, 3.5-gallon pails, and, if you need to think like a restaurant, a 275-gallon vinegar tote. Co-packing and white label sit on the same floor: wet pack, dry pack, spices, rubs, seaweed snacks. Kosher-certified. Low-sodium and gluten-free sauces. Two cases get you ten percent off. Faire is how a shop that is not on Pittsburg Road stocks the shelf.
A customer moment
The Seaside customer is often not thinking about St. Helens. They are thinking about a gift that is not taffy. The wholesale customer is a grocer or a kitchen that wants marionberry without standing over a pan. The 2024 sale is the customer moment that matters to the county: a farm brand that could have left Oregon stayed with five local couples who still list a St. Helens address.
What visitors should know
If you are on Broadway, you are looking for a jar, not a tasting room. If you are a shop, you want the wholesale page, not the gift shop. The berries are Pacific Northwest; the kettles are Columbia County; the shelf is already in Seaside. Do not expect a U-pick. Expect a lid.
If you are on Broadway, you are looking for a jar, not a tasting room.
