Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 383
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 gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in 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 gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history....
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 to the levels that would lead, within a week or two, to street riots. The “Temperance Crusade” ladies had visited his saloon the day before, and for the first time, rather than leaving when he refused to let them in, they’d arranged themselves like a hymn-singing picket line outside of the place....
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 Dutch Colonial. On either side stands a white farmhouse and a yellow Salt Box. They’re all the handiwork of Murl Ming, a Grants Pass carpenter who’s bringing grins to the faces of everyone who stops to look at these small-scale versions of the real thing. The closer you look, the more you see. All the...
“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 the next day’s edition. “They are undoubtedly men who are aware of the wealth of the heirs of the man whose remains they have stolen. There is no doubt that they are men of experience, for there is every evidence of a thoroughly matured plan to carry out the crime. The fact that the headboard and one s...
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 far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel Magone and Charles Montgomery asked a 20-year-old wood hauler named William Rector to help them steal a corpse out of River View Cemetery, Rector didn’t react the way you or I would. A job was a job, and Rector needed the work, and...
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 that reconnecting adult spring Chinook and bull trout to this high-quality habitat will substantially support the recovery of endangered fish populations in the Willamette River subbasin. The facility will include a fish ladder leading from the base of the dam up to a fish collection and sorting...
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 communities, including Nimrod and Leaburg, where her father, Chet Peden, ran the garage. As an adult, she served as president of both the Lane County and McKenzie River Home extension groups. That was in addition to participating in the Presbyterian Church choir, heading up ceramic classes, and specializing...
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 total, 14 of which are still open to traffic. To celebrate Lane County’s covered bridge heritage - and to help maintain out-of-service bridges - the Public Works Department will introduce a series of 17 covered bridge commemorative coins over the next eight years. The first commemorative coin, f...
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, funny thing: she arrived in port in ballast, with her cargo holds empty. That raised some eyebrows. At the time, Oregon was not even part of the U.S.A. yet — just a vast extranational territory jointly claimed by the U.S. and Britain. There was no national government authority to issue money, nor was the...
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 McKenzie from my granddad, Fred Russell, and the rest of the family. There were stories about Blue River, Finn Rock, Martin's Rapids, the swinging bridge to Thomson's Lodge, and the family home on Deerhorn Road across the river from Walterville near Taylor's Landing. In the early 1900s, my mother and...
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 Springfield to Sisters - thousands of them every year. Hundreds more are made and fished by individuals, who add to the pleasure and satisfaction of their sport fishing with flies of their own manufacture. Though the numbers increase yearly, the demand for professionally tied flies increases at an even...
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 ended when the suspect jumped off Hendricks Bridge and escaped. According to Lane County Sheriff's Office reports, the incident began close to 1 a.m. on February 10, with a traffic stop initiated by a Springfield Police Dept. officer. The patrolman had pulled a 1983 Mazda RX7 over in the 4500 block...
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 been convicted of masterminding a plan to swindle the U.S. government out of thousands of acres of prime timberlands. He had not yet been sentenced. Like all convicts, he had the option of either staying in jail until sentencing or posting bail. In his case, bail was set at $4,000. He figured his frien...
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 that photo, however, unlocks some of the early history of the area and gives some insights into the business of fish hatcheries and the raising of fish stocks that now play such a big role in our local economy. One man who can take a look at that picture and talk for hours about it is Art Minney...
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 been filtering up from the waterfront for at least a year and a half. So, in late November 1893, a grand jury returned indictments against 15 people - including Blum, Dunbar, and Lotan. The charges involved smuggling more than two tons of opium and running a human-trafficking operation smuggling...
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 been smuggling opium all along; but the astonishing rate at which opium-related disasters started piling up after mid-1892 following at least 18 months of smooth operations suggests that before that, they were only smuggling people. Smuggling opium was not only much more lucrative than smuggling...
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 with Nazi Germany. Matsuoka, you'll remember, spent most of his teenage years in Portland as a sort of adopted son of a prominent merchant and smuggler named William Dunbar. In this month's article, we're going to go into detail on the story of the smuggling ring that William Dunbar operated with his...
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 to be removed, the school was dismissed at Walterville. The teacher and students all walked down to the river and stood on the new bridge and watched while the county road crews dynamited the covered bridge to smithereens. The covered bridge at "The Narrows" had to be removed the same way. In 1963...
So much of the time we go busily about our everyday life with no thought of how our area got to be the way it is now. I find that most people really take interest in and enjoy the area much more once they learn something about the history behind it. As we go gliding up the McKenzie Highway, how many of us ever give any thought to what this route was like or what traveling it was like, say 100 years ago! I'll not dwell on the road-highway at this time but would like to rap some about the various...
When Yosuke Matsuoka accepted his appointment as Imperial Japan's foreign minister, it was the fulfillment of a dream for him. The gregarious 13-year-old boy who had been informally adopted into Portland opium smuggler William Dunbar's household back in 1893 had come a long way in the following 47 years. He had become a national hero in Japan, and was by far the single most famous Japanese person in the world internationally and almost certainly the most famous University of Oregon alumnus. It...
Yosuke Matsuoka left his Oregon home for the last time in 1902 when he was 22 years old; he'd lived in Oregon and, briefly, California, since age 13. His Oregon years had been happy ones, and he would remember them fondly for the rest of his life. Oregon would remember him fondly, too (until Pearl Harbor Day, of course). Within 25 years of his graduation, he would be probably the most famous University of Oregon alumnus in the world; within 50, it's most notorious. That, of course, was all far i...
Part 1 - The opium smuggler's foster son It may be true that the movement of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world can seed a tornado on the other. But whether that's literally true or not, it certainly is figuratively true, and nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the case of 1890s businessman and opium smuggler William Dunbar of Portland, Oregon. If we could take Dunbar out of the stream of history before about 1890, we would derail events that led directly to Imperial Japan's...
Opening up the Santiam Pass By M.J. Nye In the fall of 1880, a Company was organized to build a wagon road over the Cascade Mountains via what is now known as the Santiam Pass. Little or nothing was known about the country at the headwaters of the south Santiam, along which the road was later built; for it is supposed that no white man had ever crossed the Cascade Mountains at this point until 1859 when Andrew Wiley led a company of men across. Wiley had previously led a band of emigrants from...
Continued From Last Week Part 4 From the January 19, 2012 edition of McKenzie River Reflections January 18th, 1812 On January 18th two hundred years ago Donald MacKenzie finally reached the Pacific Ocean. At 27 years old and 6' 6" in height, he was already well-regarded as the assistant leader of the 60-person "Astorian Overland Party". The McKenzie River was later named after this young leader. This is the final Chapter of Travels with Mackenzie. In late November 1811, the Overland Expedition f...
