Buster Keaton made Cottage Grove a mini-Hollywood

If a Cottage Grove logger had been bonked on the head in January 1926 and woke up six months later, he would have scarcely recognized his hometown.

There was a whole new Main Street built way out east of Main Street, with businesses and boardinghouses and banks and everything. Meanwhile, back on the old Main Street, everyone in town was clustered around the Bartell Hotel, dressed in weird, archaic outfits like it was Civil War times. And there were a pair of old steam logging locomotives, shined up and gleaming, parked on a siding near the two parallel railroad tracks that ran east of town.

Let’s imagine our amnesiac logger — we’ll call him Rip Van Winkle, for obvious reasons — pauses outside the hotel to watch and see what the crowd is doing. Soon the front door of the hotel opens, and out steps — hey, is that Buster Keaton? Old Stoneface himself?

It sure is. But he’s anything but stone-faced. He’s greeting people in the crowd by name, shaking the occasional hand, and asking if everyone had a good breakfast.

Then someone behind him starts picking people out and sending them after Buster, who’s now striding along at about four miles an hour straight toward the locomotives.

Then the cameras come out, and crews are swarming around, and suddenly Cottage Grove no longer looks like Cottage Grove — it’s now Hollywood, baby.

The summer of 1926 was one that would live in the memory of Cottage Grove residents for half a century afterward, and then some. The little timber town was transformed into an enormous movie set for a picture that would go down in history as the crown jewel of the silent film era: The General.

It started, for most residents of the town, when Buster rolled in with 18 freight cars full of props, costumes, and cameras. There were covered wagons, Concord stagecoaches, Civil War cannons, and several thousand Union and Rebel uniforms and rifles.

It had started for Buster, though, the previous winter, when he was looking for a good story to base a comedy-romance-action movie around. He’d just come off of releasing Battling Butler, which was his biggest movie success yet, so he had a tough act to follow.

That’s when he learned about the Andrews Raid, which happened in 1862 during the Civil War.

The Andrews Raid was the only locomotive chase of the Civil War, and it started as a Union incursion into the South. The raiding party snuck into Georgia in civilian clothes, commandeered a locomotive called The General near Marietta, and set out racing northward toward Nashville, which Union forces had recently taken. Their goal was to tear up the track and cut the telegraph lines so the South wouldn’t be able to use it to support its troops around Chattanooga. They didn’t get much of this kind of thing done, though, mostly because they were closely pursued by a Rebel locomotive called Texas with a squad of Confederate soldiers on board.

The raiders made it almost to Chattanooga before running out of fuel, abandoning The General, and scattering. Only eight of their number made it back to friendly lines, two of them by floating down the Chattahoochee River all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; fourteen were caught, of which eight were executed as spies and six held as prisoners of war.

Buster loved trains, and he immediately saw the appeal of a madcap train chase. So he reached out to the folks in Georgia about doing a movie on location. Best of all, both locomotives — The General and Texas — were preserved in local museums.

The folks in Georgia were initially open to Buster’s plan to make a movie about the chase, especially since he was switching it up to make the hero a Southerner instead of a Yankee. But, that all changed when they learned it was going to be a comedy. The prickly Southerners were not yet OK with making jokes about their sacred Lost Cause — remember, this was just 60 years after the war ended, so it was still in living memory.

So Buster had to look elsewhere for two Civil War-era steam engines to do his chase with and a place with scenery that would look more or less like northern Georgia.

He soon found what he was looking for in Cottage Grove, where logging operations were still using wood-burning steam “lokies” to haul sticks out of the woods. Some of them were old enough to be Civil War-era machines, or at least they could be with a few easy modifications.

Buster also found the entire town of Cottage Grove was over-the-moon enthusiastic about the movie, in stark contrast with the fussy Foghorn Leghorn types who’d shut him down in Georgia.

Clearly, to borrow from another great movie, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The shooting was classic Buster Keaton. Buster was a bit of a madman on the set, planning and executing stunts that could easily have killed him. There were literally dozens of accidents and serious injuries on the set, including some tough bumps and bruises for Buster himself. But it was all in a day’s work for “Old Stoneface.”

Much of the filming was a bit repetitious, because there was only half a mile of the Oregon, Pacific and Eastern line with parallel tracks. For the chase scenes, sometimes involving all three locomotives (including the one that was pulling the flatcar that the cameras were mounted to), the rolling stock had to build to speed and get all their action in during the 90 seconds or so that it took to cover a scant half mile at 20 per.

Then the trains would be move back to the starting point, the cameras repositioned so the ridges and scenery behind would look different, and they’d do it again. Over and over. For days on end. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember it’s mostly chase scenes — and all of them are made of 60-second takes stitched artfully together, made on the same half-mile of track.

There were also some epic battle scenes. For the occasion, Buster Keaton was made a captain in the Oregon National Guard, and a big cohort of Guardsmen volunteered to fill the roles of soldiers. They ran down a hill in Union blue, shouting and shooting and with cannons blasting merrily away; then they hurried off, changed their uniforms, and ran down the opposite hill in Rebel gray, again shouting and shooting and with cannons blasting. One can’t help thinking these guys were having the time of their lives.

Having lots of manpower on the scene got pretty important later in the summer, by the way. Wood-burning locomotives are really good at lighting off forest fires, and on days when the temperatures climbed into the 100s, the crews found themselves spending almost as much time dousing wildfires as they did shooting footage.

One big one almost got away from them, which would have been very bad news for Cottage Grove; but luckily, the National Guard volunteers were on the scene that day for a big battle scene. Dressed, some in Union and others in Rebel uniforms, they charged into battle side by side against their common enemy. Buster joined them in his underwear, beating at the flames with his trousers.

Eventually the valley got too smoky to shoot in, and the cast and crew had to retreat back to 90210 and wait the fire season out, shooting what they could on studio lots while they were there before returning to finish up in September after the smoke had cleared.

(Sources: “The General (film),” an article by Jim Scheppke published Aug. 22, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia; “Buster Keaton’s Last Stand,” an article by Julian Smith published Aug. 5, 2020, in Alta Journal; “Remains of the General,” a TV package reported by Meghan Kalkstein and aired on KVAL-TV on May 23, 2007.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.

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