An Oregon Story: Cottage Grove and the Willamette River

An Oregon Story:

Cottage Grove & the Willamette River

The Willamette River snakes through its namesake valley. Hemmed in by the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east, this fertile subregion of the state of Oregon once was home to thousands of Native peoples. Many of their descendants now live on the Grand Ronde Reservation. Whites who came by the Oregon Trail settled the area in the 1830s and took up farming in the low bottom lands of the valley. Those who settled around Cottage Grove, in the southern valley, found the terrain inhospitable to large farms. Instead, the promise of gold in the Bohemia mountains and, later, timber drew the first white families.Welcome to the Center for Columbia River History’s Cottage Grove Community History Exhibit. Follow the fish to read through this Web site. Links at the bottom of many pages will take you to primary documents and oral history excerpts. Click on the Photo Archive if you want to see all of the exhibit’s images. The Oral History Archive includes transcribed interviews and audio clips. The Documents Archive features a list of all the primary documents used. Go to the Documents Archive to find Questions to Consider. These questions will engage you with the primary sources, the very material of history. The Bibliography will provide further suggestions for research and reading. Enjoy your visit.

A little over one hundred years since the onset of white settlement, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers transformed the valley with a series of dams they hoped would control the annual flooding common to the region. Cottage Grove, a town of about 8,000 residents sits between two of these dams, Cottage Grove and Dorena. This Web site examines the history of Cottage Grove through primary documents, maps, historic photos, and oral interviews. We invite you to explore the changing nature of the Cottage Grove community.

Next Page:  The Willamette River

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