By Cathy Ingalls, Albany Regional Museum board member
The late John Miles of Lebanon couldn’t locate the grave of the mid-19th century minister that founded the long-gone town of Union Point so he made it his mission to find the graves of other pioneers who crossed the Oregon Trail, settling in Linn County on original donation land claims.
It is estimated that about 1,200 families “proved up” on land claims in the county by the end of 1855.
Miles’ goal was to record as many graves as possible before the settlers’ names were lost to history.
A barber, he began his quest in the 1970s after reading Robert Duncan’s “Covenanters By the Willamette.” Members were Scottish Presbyterians.
One of the group’s ministers was Wilson Blain who founded the Union Point Academy in southern Linn County. The school was the forerunner of Albany College, which later became Lewis & Clark College.
The task to gather information for documentation became so onerous that Miles teamed up with Albany historian and genealogist Dick Milligan to help with the research. It was Milligan who convinced Miles it would be more meaningful to later readers to flesh out the lives of settlers by including information about them found in biographies, obituaries and genealogies, which Miles did.
Photo of Pioneer Settlers Vol. 1 & 36-40, interior of Albany Regional Museum’s Tripp Reference Room.
The result of their work is contained in 40 bound volumes published in 1984 titled “Linn County Oregon Pioneer Settlers. The books are available in the Albany Regional Museum’s research library, which is open to the public.
Milligan writes in his forward to the books that most of the pioneers who came to Linn County became farmers and their names along with the contributions to their communities are largely forgotten.
Milligan completed the two men’s work after Miles died halfway through the project. Miles died in 1996 and Milligan in 2011.
What follows are short biographies of some of the people who appear in the books:
William Bilyeu was born in 1785 in Kentucky, arriving in Linn County in 1852 with an ox team and 52 family members.
He lived northeast of Scio, had 11 children, and was known for being the ancestor to the most family members in Oregon, reaching more than 100, at one time most were living at the forks of the Santiam River.
Bilyeu served as a private in the War of 1812 and took part in Andrew Jackson’s campaign against the Creek Indians.
He died in 1879 and is buried at Bilyeu Den Cemetery in Scio.
Moses Bland was born in 1819 in Indiana and died in 1873 in Lebanon from typhoid fever. It was said that Bland, who had four children, was “attached to his home, family, and was highly esteemed by all.” For a time, he was a trustee and director of the Santiam Academy in Lebanon.
Gamaliel Parrish was born in 1821 in Virginia and died in 1884 on a farm in Brownsville.
It was reported that Parrish was feeling “strange” so he went to Lebanon, where a prescription was filled for him at a drug store. As instructed, he took a dose of medicine before supper and a dose afterward. He began frothing at the mouth, dying 20 minutes later. No autopsy was performed.
He was considered to be a man of a stern demeanor and was wealthy but in later days his farm was foreclosed upon.
William Tyler Vaughan was born in 1808 in what was then Virginia and is now West Virginia. In 1845, he traveled by pack train to Oregon “having an unpleasant experience” at Meek’s Cutoff. No account of what happened to him is included in the books at the museum. The cutoff branched off of The Oregon Trail in northeast Oregon, rejoining the route at The Dalles.
After living in Oregon for about a year, he returned to Missouri to bring his family back to the state with him. He apparently was unrecognizable because he hadn’t cut his hair or shaved his beard since leaving for Oregon.
On his return trip, he brought his wife, nine children, cows, and 250 head of sheep, of which only 100 survived.
In 1848, he traveled to California with pack animals and while near the American River “he helped hang some men at Hangtown.” He returned to Oregon with $14,000 in gold.
Vaughan made three more trips to California.
Eliza Spalding Warren was born in 1837 to Henry Spalding at the Nez Perce Mission in Idaho.
At age 10, she was an eyewitness to the murders by Native Americans in Walla Walla of missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman along with others. She was taken prisoner and held for three weeks until she was ransomed by officers from the Hudson’s Bay Company.
William Deakins was one of the county’s older pioneers as he was born in 1796 in Virginia. He was interested in joining the army knowing that his father fought in the Revolutionary War. Consequently, the youngster ran away to join up during the War of 1812. However, he was deemed too young to serve but he was allowed to stay, learning to play the bugle.
He is buried in Providence Cemetery near Scio.
Richard Chisholm Finley was born in 1814 in Tennessee and died in 1882 in Crawfordsville.
He was known as a Bible reader with a “great mind with more than ordinary energy and perseverance.” Finley built the first gristmill near Crawfordsville in the county, which was the only mill at that time between the Oregon Country and California. His motto was to “owe no man anything.”
His funeral cortege was large, and people wept openly at his grave.
To learn more about these and other pioneers visit the Albany Regional Museum at 136 Lyon St. S, which is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.
For information, call 541-967-7122.