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...

“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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 Oc...

From the September 8, 2011 edition of McKenzie River Reflections Two hundred years ago this month Donald MacKenzie, age 28, was making his way from the Missouri River towards Fort Astoria, as...

The "Golden Age of Outlaws" had a good run - almost 40 years. It kicked off just after the Civil War when thousands of battle-hardened Confederate veterans with nothing to lose spread out across the...

State denies Hwy. 126 speed zone request VIDA: A request to drop the speed limit on Hwy. 126 between Indian Creek And Mountain View Lane wasn't supported by a recent traffic study by the Oregon Dept....