Museums/History

Fort Stevens was named for General Isaac Ingalls Stevens, first Governor of Washington Territory, who died a hero of the Civil War of 1862. The fort was built in 1846 and decommissioned in 1947. Some 3000 acres of sandy wasteland known as Clatsop Sand Plains were stabilized here in the 1930’s by the planting of beach grass, shrubs and trees. This park area was donated to the public by Clatsop County in 1955. The Columbia River to the north was discovered by the American fur trader, Captain Robert Gray in 1792 and was named after his ship.

From 1845 to 1849, George Abernethy was the first Provisional Governor of the Oregon Country, which extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from California to Northern British Columbia. After arriving in Oregon in 1840 as part of the Methodist Mission at Champoeg, he was involved in a series of meetings that ended in the celebrated May 2, 1843, vote to organize a Provisional Government under the United States rather than Great Britain.

The 90-ton glacial erratic rock at the top of this 1/4 mile-long trail is a stranger from a distant location- it was transported here thousands of years ago on an iceberg in the wake of a cataclysmic flood.

During the last Ice Age, 13,000-15,500 years ago, a giant glacier dammed the Clark Fork River in what is today southwest Montana and created a huge lake- Glacial Lake Missoula. At 3,000 square miles, the lake held nearly 500 cubic miles of water.

Indians inhabited Oregon’s inland valleys for thousands of years before Euro-Americans began to arrive in the late 18th Century. In the early 1780s, and again in the 1830s, diseases spread by seafarers and fur trappers swept through Oregon’s valleys killing most of the native population. The opening of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s incr4eased pressure to remove the remaining Indians from their homelands. In 1856, the U.S.

This portion of the southwest Oregon is homeland to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians. They thrived here for thousands of years before contact with Euro-Americans. Living in plank-house villages, they followed a seasonal round of resource use. Moving from summer camas meadows and salmon fisheries along the rivers to the high country, they picked huckleberries and hunted for deer in the fall. By late fall they returned to the valleys to collect acorns and prepare for winter.

James W. Nesmith, born in New Brunswick, Canada on July 23, 1820, was among the first emigrants to trek the Oregon Trail in 1843. He filed a land claim near present day Monmouth in 1844, and the following year took part in the formation of Oregon's Provisional Government. Nesmith was elected to the Territorial Legislature in 1847, and was instrumental in the formation of Polk County.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, a contingent of JapaneseI-Class submarines sailed from Yokosuka via the Marshall Islands to take up positions off Hawaii and the coast of North America. Five of these vessels carried midget two-man submarines and 11 carried aircraft.

Jedediah Smith, making the first recorded overland trip from California, followed the Oregon Coast northward and on July 13, 1828 camped with seventeen trappers on the north bank of Smith River Channel five-eighths of a mile northeast of this point. The following morning, while Smith and two companions went forward to find a river crossing, the Indians came into camp and massacred all but one man. Smith and the survivors escaped to Fort Vancouver, whereupon John McLaughlin sent an expedition to the Umpqua, recovering some of Smith's furs and equipment.

Pioneer, statesman, philosopher. Leader of migration to Oregon in 1843. Leader of Provisional Government of Oregon in 1844-1849. First Surveyor General in 1844. Trailblazer, Fort Hall, Idaho, to Willamette Valley, in 1846. Member of Constitutional Convention for State of Oregon in 1857. Settled here in 1849, one-half mile west of this spot. His house was scene of first Court of Provisional Government, Southern District, 1852.

This marks the land claim of Joseph L. Meek, famed and unlettered ”mountain man,” who arrived in 1840 after driving from Fort Hall to Walla in the first wagon on that part of the Oregon Trail. He was a founder of the Provisional Government; served as the first sheriff, the first marshal, the first census taker. He carried word of the Whitman Massacre to Washington D.C., where President Polk, whose wife was his cousin, received him. Named marshal under the New Territorial Government, he accompanied Governor Lane to Oregon.