History
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Our move to Oregon: (1935)
Continued From Last Week By Maureen Trullinger, nee Barrows The first year we were at the resort my parents decided they didn’t want to keep Tom and Judy and the porcupines anymore. Judy had deeply...
NewsArk
Reprinted from the August 21, 2002, edition of McKenzie River Reflections By Maureen Trullinger, nee Barrows In about 1934 my parents, Maurice and Rose Barrows, decided they wanted to buy and run a...
Offbeat Oregon History
It was a typical balmy August evening at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The bell had rung for supper, so inmates were streaming out of their cells and heading toward the dining hall for the evening...
NewsArk
From the April 23, 1982 edition of River Reflections It was over 40 years ago, back in 1937, when Harold & Flossie Phillips moved to the McKenzie and started their way towards building one of the...
By NewsArk
From the January 28, 1983 issue of River Reflections Tempers sizzled Tuesday, January 25th, at the Lane County Planning Commissioners' public hearing for the new countywide rezoning plan, though most of them had to be put on the back burner once...
NewsArk
From the April 23, 1982 McKenzie River Reflections By the 1870s, log driving was becoming a common practice on the McKenzie but it was the 1890-1910 period that old timers recalled as THE DRIVES....
Offbeat Oregon History
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the...
Offbeat Oregon History
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the...
Riot at bar led to charges … but not against rioters
IT WAS APRIL FOOLS' DAY of 1874 when saloonkeeper Walter Moffett, proprietor of the Webfoot Saloon and sworn antagonist of the ladies of the Women’s Temperance Prayer League, escalated the conflict...
NewsArk - March 23
From the May 19, 1999 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Start of a mini building boom? Victorian village grows by the roadside WALTERVILLE: A world of fantasy is taking shape. In it is a gray...
Body-snatchers planned to ransom ex-mayor's corpse
“It is very clear that the purpose of the robbers is to conceal the remains, in the hopes that a reward will ultimately be offered for them,” the Portland Morning Oregonian’s reporter wrote, in...
Offbeat Oregon History
The nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpses in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but...
Corps to trap & transport fish over Cougar Dam
BLUE RIVER: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $9.7 million contract to Natt McDougall Company of Tualatin to reestablish upstream fish passage at Cougar Dam. Fisheries biologists believe...
NewsArk
Barbara Hyne was selected as the McKenzie Valley's "Woman of the Year" in January of 1999. Barbara Hyne came to this area as Barbara Peden when a very young girl. She lived in several local...
NewsArk - From the November 10, 2005 edition of McKenzie River Reflections
EUGENE: Lane County was the first county in Oregon to build covered bridges on a large scale and it continues to have more covered bridges than any other county west of the Mississippi River - 17...
Oregon residents had the jump on California Gold Rush
If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in. The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And,...
NewsArk - February 2, 2023
Memories about life in the McKenzie River Valley run deep in the Russell family. When I was a small boy, I spent many Sundays playing cribbage and listening to the stories about the old days on the...
A history of fly tying
Most of us have noticed fishing flies for sale somewhere here along the river. They are casually bought and sold in tackle shops, hardware stores, gas stations, restaurants, and taverns from...
NewsArk
Feb. 17, 1995 Police Find Hendricks Bridge Jumper Man Wanted In High-Speed Chase Swam Away In Icy River Walterville: A Friday morning police pursuit through Springfield and the lower McKenzie Valley...
Frontier land-fraud swindlers plundered Oregon thoroughly
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1904, Stephen A.D. Puter had just arrived at the office of U.S. Marshal Jack Matthews. He was expecting some friends to come by … and bail him out of jail. Puter had just b...
Fish racks and the early hatcheries
We've probably all seen the old "Traveling The Old McKenzie Highway" photo that shows a touring car rounding the bend of the narrow, graveled road that used to run up the valley, A closer look at...
World's clumsiest drug smugglers - also its most audacious
As you will have gathered, it didn't exactly take brilliant detective work to figure out what was going on over at Dunbar Produce and Grocery. By November of 1893, word of what they were up to had...
World's clumsiest drug smugglers were also its most audacious
It's not clear when William Dunbar and Nat Blum, owners of the Merchant Steamship Co. in Portland, started smuggling opium on their steamships, the Wilmington and the Haytian Republic. They may have...
World's clumsiest drug smugglers - also its most audacious
NOTE: In last month's Offbeat Oregon column, we explored the unlikely origins and career of Yosuke Matsuoka, the foreign minister of Imperial Japan who was responsible for Japan's military alliance wi...
McKenzie River Crossings
Reprinted from McKenzie River Reflections August 27, 1982, edition About 1925 a steel bridge was built about 100 yards below the old ferry crossing. When it was finished and the old covered bridge was...
