Next up we're visiting the little mountain town of Government Camp, OR, about 56 miles SE of Portland on US 26, and due south of Mount Hood. We aren't here to ski, or snowshoe, or attend any chic apres-ski disco parties (which as far as I know don't exist here anyway), or even sit around eating fondue and making fun of people trying to drive in the snow. We also aren't here for any extreme summer sports. We aren't even here for the hiking this time, though that's usually a good guess. No, this time it's something nerdy, unfashionable, and very small.
We're checking out a little landscaped triangle at the corner of E. Olive St., Little Trail, and Government Camp Loop (the main street through town, and the original route of US26 through here). We're looking at the one bit with a few rose bushes around a large boulder the size of a small boulder bearing a pair of old brass plaques. One is a monument to Samuel Kimbrough Barlow, namesake of the Barlow Road. The Barlow Road was the notorious local toll-road segment of the Oregon Trail, where you paid a premium to avoid drowning in the rapids at Cascade Locks, only for your rugged pioneer family to die of dysentery on their way through the mountains.
The second plaque honors his wife, Susannah Lee Barlow, a recognized Daughter of the American Revolution. The monument location was apparently at a point where the new Mt. Hood Highway (circa 1925) intersected Barlow's old road. And more importantly, it was a point where the new highway angled out of the Government Camp street grid and cut through some platted lots, and that left a 25 square foot scrap of land here, outside the highway right-of-way but far too small to do much of anything with except put up a historical marker.
Origins
The monument was proposed in June 1921 and dedicated in July 1925, in conjunction with the official grand opening of the shiny new Mt. Hood Loop Highway. A followup item in August 1925 noted that the attendees included one F.A. Gaines, presently of Jackson, MS, who had last traveled the Barlow Road as a small child in 1845.
(Elderly pioneers retracing their steps was a popular activity around this time, most famously by Ezra Meeker, who arrived by oxcart in 1852 and then retraced his steps a few times to publicize various causes: By oxcart again in 1906, for historic preservation of the old Oregon Trail; by automobile in 1916, to promote good roads; and by airplane in 1925 because he just sort of wanted to.)
Ordinarily a boulder with a couple of brass history plaques on it would be a minor local curiosity, at best. Plaques on boulders do give off an air of permanence, but they're not a great way to teach history, and getting people to actually read your monumental boulder is a whole other issue. The reason we're talking about it today is that someone had the notion of donating the marker to the state and making it an exceptionally tiny state park. The state initially declined the gift in October 1925, on the grounds that 25 square feet was too small to beautify properly. But they eventually warmed up to the idea; state parks were a sort of side hobby of the state highway department back in those days, so adopting a monument to an early builder of roads (and largely-unsuccessful collector of tolls on said roads) was hard to resist, and so the place was duly surveyed and added to the system. A prime example of this historical retcon is a 1946 historical note that calls Barlow a "pioneer roadbuilder", adopting him as a forefather of the present-day state highway department.
Per the story related there, Barlow claimed he figured out where to put the road by looking for a dip on the horizon, a place where the hills weren't quite as tall. As if he was imitating fellow Kentuckian Daniel Boone finding the Cumberland Gap. Although Appalachian geology is completely different than ours, and a key part of the Cumberland Gap turned out to be a gigantic meteor crater, and we don't have one of those here, as far as anybody knows. Or at least we don't have one yet. What probably actually happened here is the same as what happened in thousands of other places: White guy stumbles across a path used by local tribes for thousands of years. Names it after himself and tells everyone he discovered it, and they agree to believe him, and history is written down accordingly.
On coming across this route, Barlow also saw dollar signs, and somehow enlisted much of his wagon train to help out with a few months of unplanned physical labor building a rudimentary road here, thiiis close to the end of their long journey, and we may never know exactly how voluntary this volunteer work actually was. The Barlows finally arrived in Oregon City on Christmas Day, which is very late in the year to be rolling through the snowy mountains in a covered wagon. The history note doesn't say this, but it sounds to me like they may have narrowly avoided a Donner Party scenario. Barlow quickly talked the Provisional Government into letting him set up a tollbooth. The historical note doesn't explore whether the other wagon train members saw a cent of the proceeds after all the trail work they did, and in any case the Barlow Road tolls were easily evaded by the simple measure of detouring your wagon around the spot where the toll gate was located.
Once the little park was established, it duly appeared on official state highway maps like any other state park would, like map number 5C-10-18 titled "Property Acquired for Right-of-Way in Townsite of Pompeii", dated November 1927, which shows it as a tiny flyspeck, but it does label it and tells you to consult map 1R-1-795 for a closer look. To be honest I'm mostly linking to those because old hand-drawn, hand-lettered ODOT maps just look cool. Also, regarding the "Pompeii" bit: That's what the town's founder wanted to call the place, but the name was unpopular and didn't stick. Maybe locals worried the fate of the original Pompeii might scare away potential homebuyers. Or maybe they were aware of the original Pompeii's pre-volcano reputation as an epicenter of Roman debauchery, even by the empire's usual standards, and figured that might attract the wrong element. Still, if you were thinking of moving to Government Camp and starting a pizza place or a gelato shop or maybe a retro-themed Southern Italian restaurant, but you're stuck on what to call the place, working "Pompeii" into the name seems appropriate.
A few period photos of the monument in its early days can be found online, like a 1920s photo of the new monument at the Hood River History Museum, and another via the Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford. The local history museum in Government Camp is right across the street from the little monument so they may know something about it too, but their website doesn't mention it and you'd probably have to ask someone in person.
World Champion!
The monument and its tiny park had been around for about a decade when it occurred to a few people that it really was exceedingly small and as such it might even be a record-holder of some sort. In April 1936, the Oregon Journal editorial page just wanted to point out that some unnamed statewide public figure out there was going around claiming that Salem's miniscule Waldo Park was the world's smallest park, at 10 feet by 15 feet, and the paper let it be known this was not actually true, and the Salem park was a whopping six times the size of the true champion up in Government Camp. (It's actually 9.6 times as big, per Marion County property records, which give an official size of 240 square feet). And if this whole "world's smallest park" business sounds awfully familiar -- even though you've never heard of the Barlow Monument before -- just hang on; we're getting to that.
As a side note, Waldo Park is home to a single giant sequoia tree that was planted back in 1872. Assuming the tree stays healthy and continues growing at an ordinary sequoia growth rate, and lives to equal the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park maybe 1500 years from now, it will have grown larger than the present-day park. But we'll let the worrywarts of the year 3535 AD or thereabouts figure out that one.
June 1936: The Journal reprinted a similar Bend Bulletin editorial, which pinned the inaccurate claim on former State Forester Lynn F. Cronemiller (boo! hiss!). The article asked readers if they knew of other contenders around the world, but I didn't see any follow-up articles naming any, so it's possible nobody else on earth saw this as a thing worth doing.
Brief mentions of the park appeared in May 1937 and June 1938 articles on some of the gems of the state park system. Actually now that I look at the two, the 1938 piece looks like a cut-down version of the previous year's story. The 25-square-foot factoid survived the chopping block, though, and appears in both.
A few events were held at, or rather near the monument 1940-41 as the centennial of the old road approached. For example, a June 1940 dedication of a plaque on a flagpole that had been installed here the year before, with a program of general patriotic remarks and music accompaniment. A photo of the event appeared a few days later on the Journal's photo page, featuring dignitaries from the Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers and the local American Legion post. Directly below this are a couple of photos of the new Oregon Humane Society shelter on Columbia Boulevard, including a cat enclosure with what looks like a really nice climbing structure, even by today's standards. The other photo shows a row of individual enclosures for dogs, each with its own indoor and outdoor section, and mentions one adoptable dog named "Shorty" who was said to be a police dog - dachshund mix. But because 1940 was a dark and primitive time, long before the Internet, the paper did not think to show us a close-up photo of this peculiar-sounding creature.
In May 1941 there was a sort of memorial service and wreath laying at the Pioneer Woman's Grave monument further east along US 26. The writer of the small blurb seemingly got it confused with the monument in Government Camp, calling it the Barlow Monument and claiming she had been a member of the original Barlow party in 1845. I can't find any other sources claiming that, and it probably isn't true. An old USFS sign near the gravesite claimed she died in 1845, but a later DAR plaque at the site (seen in this WyEast Blog post) just gives a date range of "184?", and a later Forest Service sign (also shown in that post) hedges its bets even further and just says "18-?", and all we really know is that it dates to sometime before 1924 when the site was rediscovered by Mt. Hood Highway construction workers. But I digress.
There were undoubtedly additional Oregon Trail Centennial festivities being planned for the next few years, but then World War II came along and distracted everyone, and we don't hear about the Barlow Monument again until July 1950, when the Oregonian finally took notice of it for the first time. The usual 25-square-foot statistic appeared in a July 1950 tribute to Samuel H. Boardman, who had retired the previous week after 21 years as state park superintendent. This article was also the last time I saw it mentioned in print as the smallest state park, which might not be a complete coincidence; I've seen enough organizational politics to know what happens to a little pet project after their champion inside the org departs for whatever reason. And the state had already been deemphasizing it in recent years; it was left off of the 1950 official map of the park system, and not included in the 1946 state park guidebook, and somewhere around that time is when US 26 was rerouted to not run right through downtown Government Camp (such as it is) and straightened into its present-day not-quite-a-freeway form, which reduced the odds of visitors randomly stumbling across the tiny park on their way to somewhere else.
A New Challenger Approaches
Going by all of that, it seem the Barlow Monument's star had already waned quite a bit by February 1954, when an Oregon Journal article covered the quote-unquote "official dedication" of Portland's now-famous Mill Ends Park, though the tongue-in-cheek article insisted the park had already been known by that name for "lo, these many years". Apparently there had been some sort of name contest anyway, and Mill Ends narrowly beat out "Portland Envoy Park", named after the variety of rose planted there. I can't seem to find any info on the net about that particular rose variety, and so Google's dumbass search AI insists it does not exist, and scoffs at you for even asking such a ridiculous question.
So yes, the same newspaper that dreamed up Mill Ends Park was previously involved in promoting the Barlow Monument as possibly the world's smallest, and that has got to be how they arrived at the idea.
From that point forward, Mill Ends Park featured regularly in Dick Fagan's regular column. A May 1955 column indignantly notes that some national magazine had once again proclaimed Waldo Park as the very smallest, and points out that it was a whopping 200 times the size of Mill Ends Park. The present-day Mill Ends Park comes to just 452 square inches, or about 3.14 square feet, so it's also roughly 1/8 the size of the previous maybe-champion up in Government Camp.
A 1955 ODOT map of Highway 26 thru the Government Camp area still shows the mini-taxlot but doesn't bother labeling it like earlier maps had done.
The old Barlow Monument got one more brief mention in an October 1965 tour route article, which just says "Just before entering town you’ll pass the BARLOW MONUMENT, which honors the founder of the trail your route now more or less follows." and doesn't say anything about it being a tiny state park.
So what happened? I think the public sort of lost any interest it ever had in seeking out boulders with brass plaques on them. Which, frankly, was never a great way to teach history, let's be honest here. And the "world's smallest" claim is less compelling if you have to include the "smallest *state* park" asterisks. So as far as I can tell, I think everyone just sort of forgot about the place and it slipped away like spare change falling under the sofa cushions.
For whatever it's worth, there's also a smallest unit of the National Park System: Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial (0.02 acres / 871.2 square feet) is a historic house in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War hero lived for a few months in 1797 after leading a failed uprising against the partition of his native Poland. The site was added to the National Park system in 1972, partly as a leadup to the 1976 Bicentennial and partly to troll the Soviets, who had once again swiped territory from Poland at the end of WWII.
Other interesting semi-random search results (all of them larger than either Mill Ends or the Barlow Monument) include Septuagesimo UNO, the smallest park in New York City; Park No. 474, the smallest in Chicago; and Prince's Park in Burntwood, Staffordshire, the smallest in the UK. Morton Park in Vancouver BC just might be the smallest park full of creepy laughing statues, and let me suggest that we not challenge them for that particular title.
Today
The present-day park, or ex-park, has a couple of rose bushes around the monument itself, and it looks like someone comes by regularly to fuss over them, but so far I haven't figured out who's responsible for the place these days. A current Clackamas County survey map indicates it's not an official tax lot anymore (if it ever was one), so we can't go by ownership records. Ownership of the adjacent streets is mixed: ODOT still owns Government Camp Loop (the main drag thru Government Camp, and part of the old Mt. Hood Highway) as a "frontage road" for US 26, while side streets belong to the county since there's no such thing as a City of Government Camp. The county has tried to tempt the locals into at least becoming a "village" or a "hamlet", two different flavors of lightweight local sorta-government, but so far they haven't taken the bait for that either.
(Note that "Oregon Trail Hut" next door to the monument is not part of the park, and I don't know who (if anyone) takes care of it, either. It's also not old; it was built by high school students in 1992, which I maintain was not that long ago, at least not in geological terms.)
Anyway, just going by inertia we should probably assume the state still owns it. And I haven't seen any records saying the old state park was ever officially abolished; they just sort of stopped talking about the place after a while. And if it still existed on paper, somewhere in an old file cabinet, ORS 390.111 might apply. That's the 1989 law splitting the department off from ODOT. The law says the new department "has complete jurisdiction and authority over all state parks, waysides and scenic, historic or state recreation areas, recreational grounds or places acquired by the state for scenic, historic, natural, cultural or recreational purposes except as otherwise provided by law". (This transfer did not include things like highway rest areas and roadside historical markers, which are managed by yet another state agency, the Oregon Travel Information Council. Their map of historical markers doesn't include this so they don't seem to have claimed it.)
So, long story short, it's possible this little spot is still technically a state park, albeit one that nobody at any state agency is really aware of anymore. And if it is, it just might still be the very smallest state park. As one data point, here's someone's 2011 blog post I came across that tried to identify the smallest state park in each state, and all of the ones listed are quite a bit larger than 25 square feet.
Another complication to all this is that Mill Ends Park, like the Barlow Monument, is just part of road right-of-way, and Naito Parkway / Front Avenue is technically the route of OR 99W -- a state highway -- through downtown Portland, though it's only state maintained south of Market St., a few blocks south of Mill Ends, but that was not always the case, and I guess what I'm getting at here is that we're within spitting distance of being able to claim Mill Ends may have technically been a state park for a while, though the state may have been completely unaware of this fact, or near-fact, or whatever.
And for the pedants out there who insist it can't be a park unless it includes at least one taxlot (you know who you are) -- which Mill Ends doesn't, and the Barlow Monument may have done once but doesn't now -- the smallest one might be the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, located on NE Sandy in Portland's Hollywood District, and the traditional centerpiece of Portland Veterans Day commemorations. At 48 square feet it's almost twice the size of the Barlow Monument, but five of them would fit inside Waldo Park. The flagpole is nowhere near as tall as the tree in Waldo Park, so a "max width to max height ratio" category might be a closer contest, though at that point we're just inventing goofy categories so Salem can finally win at something for once.
OK, Now What?
So it's possible we had a series of local champions, each smaller than the previous one: Waldo Park, then the Barlow Monument, and then Mill Ends (452 in^2), and in 2022 the city of Talent, OR unveiled a park 78 square inches smaller (374 in^2), and a town in Japan unveiled a slightly smaller one (372 in^2) at the end of 2024.
An arms race of incrementally shrinking smallest parks sounds really tedious, and ultimately the way to get the crown back for good will involve enlisting Intel to fabricate the tiniest sub-microscopic circle they can manage with their swanky new deep ultraviolet lithography machines; mount it somewhere outside in something theft-proof, maybe by attaching it to a large boulder, and proclaim that as the new smallest park.
Even that might not be enough, though; back in 1989, material scientists at IBM managed to create a company logo with 35 individual xenon atoms. A square of four xenon atoms would be smaller than that, though I bet a molecule with bonds between the atoms would be a lot smaller than that. And for that matter you could take a single atom and say that just the nucleus is your city park, and use hydrogen instead of xenon for the smallest nucleus so that your park is just a single proton. And that might be the end of the line, since I remember reading that all protons are believed to be the exactly same size, and you can't exactly pull individual quarks out of your proton and do anything with them, because quantum chromodynamics, and even if you could, they're probably all the same exact size too. And if it's all ultimately going to end in a tie anyway, we might as well shrink Mill Ends (and the one down in Talent) to match the one in Japan, but not go any smaller than that, and call it a three-way tie and stop there.
