By Cathy Ingalls, Albany Regional Museum board member
With the arrival of spring, here’s a fun way to learn about some of the cities that were settled with great promise in Marion and Polk counties but ended up in most cases disappearing altogether: And it's a chance to teach children some history while enjoying a family road trip.
Settlers moved west to the Oregon Country in the 1830s and 1840s, all the time looking for new life opportunities. The arrivals staked out land claims near each other and then they built town sites.
The mini-cities consisted mainly of churches, saloons, post offices, hotels, gristmills, schools, warehouses, blacksmith shops and general stores.
Those towns prospered for a while and then for a variety of reasons, the residents were forced to move on, often leaving no trace that the communities ever existed.
Here are the stories of some of those cities.
Alfred Hovenden, pioneer of 1849, born in England in 1822. Lived with his family at Butteville in 1870 and worked as a farmer. No Copyright. Available digitialcollection.ohs.org reference code: ba000623
Butteville: It is located a few miles downstream from Champoeg State Park in north Marion County. A post office was established in 1850, and as the steamboat trade expanded on the Willamette River, the town became an important grain shipping point. When Champoeg was destroyed by the floods of 1861, Butteville emerged as the primary town in the area.
The city, which consisted of four general stores, three saloons, several blacksmith shops and a vinegar factory, reached the height of its importance at the end of the Civil War. For a time, Butteville was a contender for the county seat of the newly formed Clackamas County.
But the town shrivleled up when the railroad arrived on the nearby French Prairie in the early 1870s, by-passing the city.
A general store is pretty much all that remains of Butteville.
Belpassi: It is south of Woodburn and was developed in 1851 around The Cumberland Presbyterian Church. With the opening of a one-room school, the site became a meeting place for pioneers and a regular stop on the valley stagecoach route.
The town never blossomed into a residential settlement nor was it commercially important. Soon the railroad reached Woodburn and Gervais so the stagecoach route was discontinued. By the turn of the 19th century, a cemetery was pretty much all that was left of the gathering place.
Waconda: It is said that the name means God in a forgotten Native American tongue. It remains a modern day community north of Keizer and dates to 1905 when a post office opened.
The original Waconda was established several miles to the east and was a stage stop. That village was platted in 1866 and Main Street, now Highway 99E boasted a hotel, two blacksmith shops, two general stores, a saloon, a butcher shop, drug store and several homes and the Kern and Glaiser Brewery.
Five years later the town was little more than a memory. That is because the Oregon and California Railroad established a depot a mile to the north, calling the new station Gervais.
Lincoln: It is in north Polk County on the Salem-Dayton Road and today it is at a crossroads boasting only a country store, but it once was a bustling town that claimed to be the largest wheat-shipping port upstream from Portland. Wharves and warehouses once stretched for a half mile along the Willamette, but they have vanished without a trace.
What was to become Lincoln began as Doak's Ferry and was established by Andrew Doak in the mid-1840s. Grain brought to the site was shipped to markets in California, Alaska and Asia.
Lincoln took its new name from the Civil War era to honor President Lincoln. By the late 1870s besides regular businesses it was home to a tin shop and a beehive enterprise.
By the early 1880s, the steamboat trade had given over to railroads, and years of successive wheat crops had depleted the fertile farm land. As yields fell, residents moved on.
Bethel: The community, which is 6.2 miles west on Zena Road from Lincoln, traced its beginnings to an accredited college. The first school was opened in 1852 by Dr. Nathaniel Hudson in a log house less than a mile south of the present church. The school offered classes through the 8th grade to area emigrants.
Bethel Church (formerly Bethel College), northwest of Salem, Oregon; looking southeast from driveway. The building in the rear is the former school's gymnasium/auditorium. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. No changes made. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bethel_Church_1.jpg
When Hudson moved to Dallas in 1854, the school closed. But then Bethel Institute opened in 1856 as a high school, and in 1858, Bethel College was chartered by the Oregon Territorial Government.
However, residents could not afford to pay to keep up the schools so when the railroad arrived at the nearby town of McCoy, Bethel practically vanished.
Ellendale: It is about 2.5 miles west of Dallas and first appeared in 1864 when area businessmen incorporated as the Ellendale Mill Co., and began constructing a woolen mill, hoping to capitalize on the region's growing number of sheep flocks.
A crew of 20 staffed the mill, mostly people from England and Scotland. One of the workers was Thomas Kay, who later founded the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill in Salem.
Never a commercial success, the mill caught fire in 1871 and was not rebuilt, and the town went into a decline.
Portrait of Abigail Scott Duniway holding "The New Northwest" newspaper. Albany Regional Museum Collection 2011.088.017
Eola: It is on Highway 22 west of Salem and was first known as Cincinnati. It is said that A.C.R. Shaw named the town that because he fancied the location reminded him of Cincinnati. At one time, the place was considered to become the state capital.
The town was platted in 1855 with 45 city blocks and 18 streets. At one time, Eola had a newspaper, The Weekly Times.
As Salem became a regional trading center, Eola's future declined, and then a flood in 1890 destroyed warehouses and businesses.
Suffragette Abigail Scott Duniway taught school there in 1853.
The word Eola means winds in Greek mythology.
Finally, Silver Falls City also known as Silver Creek Falls, Falls City and Argenta east of Salem became the locale for major timber interests.
The first sawmill was built in the late 1880s near the present state park campground. By 1905, there were three mills employing loggers and millhands.
The town contained a general store, post office, hotel, church, blacksmith shop, school and dance hall.
Supplies and mail were hauled in from Sublimity, and lumber was freighted from the mills by horse-drawn wagons to the rail spur at Shaw.
With the arrival of the railroad, the commercial success of Silver Falls City grew. But by the mid-1920s, logging operations had moved east deeper into the Cascades, leaving the Silver Creek watershed a near wasteland of stumps and snags.
The area later revived with the creation of Silver Falls State Park in 1931.
The Albany Regional Museum is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m Tuesday through Friday. You can call 541-967-7122 or email info@armuseum.com with questions or requests for assistance.