(Sign A) This building was a Military Blockhouse built at the Grand Ronde Agency by Willamette Valley settlers in 1856. U.S. troops were sent to the station the same year and it was named "Fort Yamhill." Among the famous Army officers stationed at this fort were Sheridan, Wheeler, A.J. Smith, D.A. Russell and Hazen.
Long before the first Euro-American emigrants trekked westward, this road was a trail used by the Takelma and Shasta Peoples as a trade route. With the arrival of settlers and gold-seekers, the trail quickly became a wagon road called “Indian Market Road.”
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.
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.
The pass located east of here through the Cascade Range was once called Wiley Pass after Andrew Wiley. Wiley with other Willamette Valley pioneers explored it in 1859 while searching for a route to move their livestock to the grass lands of central Oregon for summer grazing. In 1864 the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Military Wagon Road Company was formed and submitted plans to the U.S. Government for a Military Road to be built along the route as far east as the mouth of the Malheur River.
The first trading post in the Willamette Valley was located on the Prairie Knoll just east of this point. The post was established in 1811 by the Astor Company to trade for furs and to take game which was cured and sent by canoe to Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. Subsequently operated by the North West Company for about ten years, it was influential in bringing settlers to the French Prairie-Champoeg Area-the site of the organization of the first government by Americans on the Pacific Coast.
Hotel in the heart of the Willamette Valley.
3301 Market St. NE.
Salem, OR 97301
503-370-7888
