Corvallis, Oregon

“ Joseph C. Avery was the first owner of the site of Corvallis, and he was a pioneer of 1845. He died in 1876. Avery made up the name Corvallis by compounding Latin words meaning heart of the valley. It is said that the name Marysville was changed to prevent confusion with Marysville, California. Corvallis has an elevation of 224 feet and the geography of its immediate surroundings may be seen on the USGS map of the Corvallis quadrangle. Avery's post office was established January 8, 1850, with J. C. Avery postmaster. ”

“ One-fifth of the whole population are married, or they have been married and are widowers and widows. Two-fifths of the whole population are born in wedlock. Surely such a people are virtuous and happy.
As noted briefly elsewhere in this volume, the Oregon Statesman, now of Salem, was the first newspaper published in Corvallis. ”

“ Financed in June, 1857, by J. C. Avery, the founder of Corvallis, and known as "Avery's Ox." For editor Avery imported L. P. Hall and chose as compositors Stephen Gillis and Fred Russ. Hall resigned to be followed by T. B. Odeneal, who later issued the Democratic Crisis. The Messenger was the ne plus ultra of slavery propaganda in Oregon. A more radical vehement and defiant advocate of slavery could not be found in North Carolina.
Oregon Statesman. Located in Corvallis for a few months in 1855 when this city was the seat of the government. Soon returned to Salem.
Oregon Weekly Union. ”

“ As editor and proprietor of the Corvallis Gazette, with all the varied and petty details incident to the duties of a country editor, and with his temperament averse to detail, diametrically opposed to plodding business, he courted failure and met the inevitable. Had he gone to the centres of population and sold the product of his brain he would have reaped the wealth and fame others less gifted than himself have garnered.
The move was a success in that it gave to us much of the best literature, both poetry and prose ever produced in this state, and Oregon is the richer for his effort. ”

“ Oregon City, Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene. We have already learned that the capital was located at Oregon City and then at Salem; and now we are about to see how it happened that Corvallis and Eugene, each in its turn, came nearly being chosen as the permanent capital. January 13, 1855, a bill was passed by the legislature removing the seat of territorial government from Salem to Corvallis, [5] and the university from Corvallis to Jacksonville. Since work had already been commenced on the public buildings at Salem, opposition to the change was very strong. ”

“ A wagon-road from Corvallis, the county-seat, to Yaquina Bay, gives this county an advantage over others that are quite cut off from the sea-coast by the inaccessibility of the mountains. The best dairy-lands in Western Oregon are those creek-bottoms and tidelands along the coast, where the grass is perpetually green and of excellent quality. ”

“ The lower portion is heavily timbered, but where cleared produces abundant crops. It has, besides, mineral resources—coal in the mountains, and gold in the back-sands. The upper part of the valley, from one to three miles wide and twelve long, is mostly settled up with thrifty and industrious people.
The pass through the Coast Range, by which the Oregon Pacific comes to Corvallis, perceptibly affects the climate of
Benton County, giving it the benefit of a modified sea-breeze in the summer season. ”

“ The Corvallis Gazette was established 1862 as a stanch Republican, Lincoln-following newspaper, with T. B. Odeneal as editor. This the same Odeneal who had edited Avery's Ox and the Democratic Crisis, but, like Bush at Salem, he had been converted to the Union cause and the policies of Lincoln. W. F. Boyakin was editor in 1865. Later the 60's William B. Carter, assuming the editor ship, advocated Republican policies and also swung the Gazette over to the support of prohibition, making the paper the official organ of the grand lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars in Oregon. ”

“ J. B. Cardwell at Corvallis, and there a telegraph office with a register was duly installed, but not a single telegram was transmitted for pay from Corvallis office and a very limited business was done at Portland with Warren Davis as operator, and at Oregon City where D. W. Craig, (a pioneer printer and editor, yet living at Salem, eighty years of age) , did the "brass pounding," during the long interval occupied in the canvassing for funds for the construction of the line. The project proving a failure, the work was abandoned and the enterprising co-laborers left the country. ”

“ All those who attended this convention were republicans. Whether Oregon should be a free or slave state, had now become the paramount issue in our local politics. A paper had been started at Corvallis, called The Messenger, to advocate the establishment of slavery in Oregon. I was a democrat, but in early life imbibed prejudices against slavery that to some extent diluted my democracy. Many of the most influential democrats, with General Lane at their head, were active for slavery, and there was little or nothing said or done among the democrats on the other side of the question. ”

“ Before this was done, and perhaps in order that it might be done, the almost completed state house, with the library and furniture, was destroyed by fire, on the night of the 30th of December, which was the work of an incendiary. The whigs charged it upon the democrats, and the democrats charged it upon "some one interested in having the capital at Corvallis." ”

“ The qualities that made men popular on the plat form in early Oregon, are evident in the appraisals contained in the biographical sketches written a long while ago. To give an idea of what an orator was expected to be like and often was like in former times, a few orator descriptions are here lifted from those old biographies. Take first Hon. John Burnett, who came in 1858 to Corvallis, "without money and without friends, a stranger in a strange land":
It is as an advocate that he has made some of his most effective speeces.... His style of eloquence is bold, manly and full of deep feeling ”

“ Sam L. Simpson
Frances Fuller Victor
In 1870 he took up journalism, at which he made his living the remaining twenty-nine years of his life. He bought the Corvallis Gazette and became its editor. The respect that "Beautiful Willamette" and his other literary contributions had brought him, is indicated by the following notice in the Oregon State Journal, Eugene City, March 19, 1870:
It is reported that the Corvallis Gazette has been bought by the Union men of Benton County, and will be conducted henceforth in the interest of the Republican party. ”

“ This is an island in the Willamette River south of Corvallis. This was named for a prominent citizen of Benton County, who lived in Corvallis for many years. He owned the island and other land in the vicinity.
JOHNNY KIRK SPRING, Grant County. This spring is on John Day Highway, north of Dayville. It bears the name of an eccentric pioneer character who settled in the John Day Valley, after having been a participant in the '49 gold rush to California. He came to Oregon probably about 1870. In the winter he lived in his bachelor's cabin near the spring that now bears his name ”

“ Frequently they would have to say good- bye at Corvallis. The Indian women would feel awfully bad to have their soldier lovers leave, as they knew they would never see them again.
"When we came here in 1844 our claim was a great camping place for the Indians. There would be scores of tepees along the creek. It was like a big camp meeting, only they were Indians in place of white people and instead 1 of meeting to sing and pray they had met to race horses and to gamble. We children used to love to go to their camp and watch them gamble. ”

“ Soon after this part of the country fell into the hands of the white men, he, too, saw the importance of that location and eagerly seized it, and was no less willing to make it a source of profit, in fact, to use it "for all it was worth," proving that human nature is the same, be it Indian or white man. F. A. Chenoweth, afterwards Judge Chenoweth, of Corvallis, settled at the Cascades, and in 1850 built the first portage road on the line of the old Indian trail, which had been in use so long "that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." ”

“ The foot-hills of the mountains approach within a few miles on either side, but those nearest the valley are rounded, grassy knolls, over which are scattered groups of firs, pines, or oaks, while the river-bottom is bordered with tall cottonwoods, and studded rather closely with pines of a lofty height and noble form.
Two tributaries enter the Wallamet between Corvallis and Eugene—the Muddy, from the east, and Long Tom from the south-west. The country on the Long Tom is celebrated for its fertility, and for the uncompromising democracy of its people. ”

“ In 1855 the construction of a telegraph line from Portland to San Francisco was begun. The line was actually completed as far as Corvallis, and a few messages transmitted, at least as far as Salem. It went through Oregon City and to Salem on the east side, and at the latter place crossed over to the west side, and thence to Corvallis. The wire was light iron and the insulators the necks of common 'junk' bottles placed around straight iron pins or nails in the tops of poles. ”

“ Senator Mitchell obtained $80,000 for the erection of a first-class lighthouse near the mouth of the Umpqua river; $15,000 for a site and wharf at Astoria for the use of the lighthouse department, and asked for money to construct the revetment of the Willamette at Corvallis.
The coast counties developed very gradually, although they received a part of the immigration, and were finally prosperous. Scottsburg projected a railway which, if it can be extended to Coos bay, should be a good investment. ”

“ Like Orange Jacobs and H. R. Kincaid, he had no special place or caption for the paragraphs he presented with special literary touche s.
The Gazette says a "lady living near Corvallis has recently enriched her lord by presenting him with a pair and a half of healthy infants." We should like to see the "half of that healthy infant." Wonder which half it was. July 30. 1870.
We notice the Portland and Walla Walla papers are putting on airs because they have green corn to eat. Why, bless your souls, we had it here in Lane about ten months ago. July 30. 1870. A honied threat—Bee-ware. ”

“ His work was the organization on paper of the Oregon City College at Oregon City in 1849. Mr. Fisher's college was eclipsed by the gold mining rush to California in that year; and the good man was afterwards engaged in keeping a respectable hotel at Salem in 1864. The first Baptist school incorporated in Oregon after Fisher's effort was the "Corvallis Institute" incorporated in 1856. It also ended with the Act of Incorporation. In 1857 the Legislature chartered the "West Union Institute" in Washington County, with David Lenox, E. 11. ”

“ Leaving Salem, a journey of twenty-four hours passes us through Corvallis and Eugene City; and through an exceedingly beautiful and rich agricultural country on to Oakland, where the celebrated "Baker Mills" are established, producing, it is said, the finest flour in Oregon. The disasters of the flood were too visible at each and every point, sweeping away bridges and ferries, and destroying property to the extent of thousands of dollars. ”

“ It was published at Oregon City till June 1853, when it was removed to Salem, and being and remaining the official paper of the territory, followed the legislature to Corvallis in 1855, when the capital was removed to that place and back again to Salem, when the seat of government was relocated there a few months later. As a party paper it was conducted with greater ability than any journal on the Pacific coast for a period of about a dozen years. Bush was assisted at various times by men of talent.... ”

“ This pacified the Indians. As the officers were returning to their commands, Nesmith observed to Lane, 'When you have another council of war, I wish to be excused.' The general said in reply: 'Captain luck is always better than war'."—Binger Herman.
Third Outbreak of the Rogue River Indians. Being convinced that war with the Rogue River Indians was about to begin again, Governor Curry on the 15th of October, 1855, issued a proclamation from Corvallis, the temporary capital of Oregon, for nine companies of mounted cavalry. ”

“ OREGON, Benton County, Corvallis vicinity, **Rickard, Peter, Farmstead, SW of Corvallis (09/15/83)
Multiple Resource Areas are identified by MRA
Thematic Resources are identified by TR
**Nominations substantively reviewed by the National Park Service
NHL designates a National Historic Landmark
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States federal government (see 17 U.S.C. 105) . ”

“ STEARNS, LOYAL B., Portland, June 2, 1936, 83, pioneer of 1854.
STORAN, EMILY, Portland, July 22, 1936, 89.
VEY, JOSEPH, Pendleton, August 18, 1936, 95.
WEISTER, ALICE, Portland, July 9, 1936.
WHITBY, MARY HARRIS, Corvallis, August 4, 1936, 80, born near Corvallis, August 19, 1855; at the time of her death she was the oldest living graduate of the Oregon State College, having graduated in 1871.
WILLIS, MARY MARSH, Portland, June 15, 1936, 81, born at The Dalles.
WILSON, CLEMENTINE L., Portland, May 30, 1936, 69, born at Portland, October 2, 1866. ”