Barlow Monument, Government Camp

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Wilhoit Springs

Our next obscure destination is a bit unusual and requires some background info. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth, it was widely believed that mineral spring water was something close to a miracle cure for whatever historical ailment was troubling you -- consumption, dropsy, quinsy, lycanthropy, apoplexy, dysentery, ague, gout, scrofula, anemia, neurasthenia, neurosis, halitosis, hysteria, headcrabs, catarrh, clownpox, ennui, lockjaw, jazz hands, and Vidiian phage, just to name a few.

The trick was to find the spring resort that was best aligned with your delicate constitution and many ailments and was also as fashionable as you could afford to be, and go there to take the waters and undergo the latest regimen of fanciful spa treatments while also seeing and being seen for however long the local social season ran. Eventually you would feel better and return to your teeming grey city choked with coal smoke and various miasmas, and soon be in need of further spa treatments. This business model thrived for a couple of centuries but eventually faded out as all medical fads eventually do. Like the Dr. Hasenpfeffer's Patent Tonic your great-grandparents swore by, a harmonious scientific blend of radium and opium, along with 17 secret ingredients, all of which were cocaine. Or the omega-3 'n oat bran açaí breakfast bars everybody pretended to like back in the 2000s; in retrospect it was all downhill after they deleted the carbs and packed them full of coenzyme Q10 and shark cartilage instead. But I digress.

The Pacific Northwest of the 19th century was not immune to the fads of the day, and federal land programs made it easy for ambitious businessmen to pick up promising springs for next to nothing, so for a few decades Western Oregon was awash in spring resorts. Nearly all of them had vanished without a trace by the end of the Great Depression, at the latest, but vestiges of a few of them have survived to the present day, largely by accident. With that intro, you won't be surprised to learn that we're visiting one of those vestiges in this post. Present-day Wilhoit Springs is a small and obscure county park in a remote corner of Clackamas County, but in its heyday it was one of the most popular and renowned mineral spring resorts in the West, or at least the Northwest. Today nothing survives of the old resort except the springs themselves, but a page at Offbeat Oregon has a bunch of vintage photos from the resort era, and if you look around long enough you can sort of visualize how the place was laid out.

I'm not going to to rehash the entire history of the resort since that page covers it pretty well, but a lot of the info I came across about the place falls into a rough timeline, so here's another one of those:

• One thing that really struck me was how early things got going here. I mean, by Pacific Northwest standards. Wilhoit Springs first appeared in Portland newspapers way back in 1870, when a "mineral expert" claimed that the waters closely resembled those at Saratoga Springs, NY. Which at the time was possibly the most prestigious springs district outside of Western Europe. This was less than two decades out from the peak years of the Oregon Trail, and at least some of the spa's guests must have come across that way. There were no railroad links to the outside world just yet, and the main alternative to arriving by covered wagon was still to come by sailing ship around Cape Horn, which would not have been any easier on individuals of a delicate and refined constitution. I dunno, I'm just tickled by the idea that a few of the rugged tough-as-nails pioneers of 1855 eventually figured out that the no-frills, no-fun pioneer life had been somewhat oversold, and that being fussed over by attentive spa staff was actually kind of nice.
• By 1873, Wilhoit soda water could be had, bottled, for $1.50/dozen at E.B. Hill's store at 1st & Yamhill. The ad promises the water will revive one's drooping spirits, and cure whatever general debility one might be experiencing.
• Skipping forward a bit, here's a 1917 report from a local auto dealer raving about the little-known but majestic sights at Silver Falls, described as a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads from the world-famous Wilhoit Springs. Whereas now, a bit over a century later, Wilhoit Springs is an obscure destination, which can accessed from world-famous Silver Falls by a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads.
• "The Landscapes of Hot Springs and Mineral Springs in Western Oregon" a 1973 masters thesis in geography, inventorying the scattered remnants of the taking-the-waters era. Which is more interesting than you might think.
• A 1983 Oregonian article about the place says the county would really like to find some money to revive the long-forgotten park, but it isnt mentioned again in the paper until 2009. And nothing I saw when I visited looked like it was new since 2009, so they have probably not found the money yet.
• Not about Wilhoit, but related: Here's a 2004 USGS report on the many hot springs near Mt. Hood (which is obviously a significant source of heat). One of which is the spring that once served the long-vanished burg of Swim, OR, home of Mt. Hood Mineral Springs Resort, which went under during the Depression and never came back. Apparently the actual springs are fenced off now, supposedly to protect the habitat of a rare dragonfly.
• A couple of 2010s posts from the blogosphere, including a Great Grey Owl sighting and a family hike report
• A 2023 KGW segment profiling the park's longtime caretakers

The county park itself is only around 18 acres, but it's surrounded by a larger chunk of federal BLM land. 136 acres surrounding the park are managed as the Wilhoit Springs ACEC (where ACEC stands for "Area of Critical Environmental Concern"), which in turn is included as part of the 316 acre Wilhoit Springs RMA ("Recreation Management Area"). A 2016 BLM planning doc for Salem District RMAs notes that the ACEC "protects a rare stand of low elevation old growth conifer forest in the foothills of the Cascade Range". It's at least possible that proximity to the springs is what protected the area from being logged in the era when surrounding areas were being rapidly clearcut. So even if there's no medical value to mineral water in itself, this is potentially something good that came of people believing it for a long time.

While putting this post together I also ran across pages about Wilhoit Springs at FindASpring.org and TryWater.club, and realized there's an entire internet subculture of spring water enthusiasts out there that I had no idea about, and they seem to fall along a broad spectrum. With, on one hand, people who just prefer the taste over the commercial bottled stuff or the local tap water, to people who think it has health benefits, and over on the far end are people who are convinced They (you know, aliens and lizard people and Hollywood and Monsanto and Nestle and Disney and the government and George Soros. You know, They.) are working together to poison everyone with fluoride and chlorine and dihydrogen monoxide and whatever, and they're desperate to find pure raw untainted water for their unvaccinated families to drink, which -- as you might expect -- involves a great deal of Doing Your Own Research Online. As a pre-COVID example, here's a 2013 OregonHikers forum thread where a raw water person dropped in with a few questions and a mild culture clash ensued.

Speaking of which, it turns out chlorinated tap water originated in Jersey City, NJ in 1908, and exactly how that came about is kind of an interesting story.

For what it's worth, SoakOregon also has a map covering the state, but that site is more oriented to hot spring enthusiasts, which is an adjacent (but not identical) subculture, and Wilhoit isn't listed since the springs aren't hot.

But enough of that; let's pivot to the question you were impatiently waiting to ask: Did I try the water? And if so, what's it like?

Of course I tried it. I mean, I may come across as a bit overcautious sometimes, and out of this caution I have to say that Legal says not to try the water, because it's possible you won't like it and sue me for mental anguish or something. Or you might slip and fall while filling a water bottle, and I don't want to be liable for that either. But for my part, I filled a couple of 16oz. bottles from the main spring in the park, the one with the little pavilion built around it. I keep reading there's another spring elsewhere in the park but I have no idea where it is. As I was heading to the car, I passed an elderly babushka lady who was carrying several large jugs to the spring I had just left. She didn't say anything but smiled and nodded, like she was pleased to see another person who knew about and appreciated the place.

As for the taste, imagine you've dissolved a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets (or a generic store brand, it doesn't matter) in a glass of water, and while drinking that you somehow bite your lip and it starts bleeding, and so you taste a combination of those two things. The water is somehow not quite as gross as that sounds, but it's still definitely an acquired taste. I also tried it as a mixer, based on a Reddit thread I saw in which someone else did the same. And honestly it was quite drinkable that way. I mean, it was better than drinking the water by itself, and also better than just downing a straight shot of gin by itself. Think of it as the gin-and-tonic effect, where two ingredients can be a good combo even though neither is very palatable on its own. And to take the paradox a step further, the Wilhoit Springs gin rickey is not as good as a classic G&T, but given the choice I would definitely pick the spring water over an equal-sized glass of straight tonic water. I have no idea how this sensory phenomenon works; it just does, ok?

HCRH Milepost 17

A few of you out there might remember an old project I did around the Stark St. Milestones, a series of very old stone markers along Stark St. each carved to indicate the distance in miles from downtown Portland (measured specifically from the intersection of SW Broadway & Washington St.), with a surprising number of surviving stones, from milestone P2 embedded into a wall at Lone Fir Cemetery in inner SE Portland, out to P14 on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College, along the east edge of Gresham and Troutdale. I mentioned a few times that Stark was eventually extended across the Sandy River to join the new Columbia River Highway, and they decided to continue the existing mile numbering as the highway continued east. I didn't follow suit immediately; I was just happy to have collected the whole set thru #14. You will not be surprised to learn that I recently decided to go ahead and do HCRH mile markers as a project. I didn't see anyone else doing it, for one thing, and for another I'd recently bought a fun new car and this was a fresh excuse to take it out for a spin on several weekends over the summer.

As for the scope of this project: After MHCC there are apparently no markers for miles 15 and 16, and it's unclear whether those ever existed. Then there's a continuous stretch of mileposts from 17 thru 36 (except for the currently-missing 19 and 20). There's an odd one-off wooden Milepost 43 around the eastern outskirts of Cascade Locks, and a few sporadic ones numbered in the 50s and low 60s this side of Hood River, picking up again east of town at 67 and continuing east to around 88 on the west side of The Dalles, and I've heard there are even more of them way out in the Umatilla area with mile numbers in the 170s, but those may not be part of the same "miles from Portland" sequence, in which case they don't count. So the exact end of this thing is TBD, and for those of you following along at home (and rushing out to visit each one as the next post goes up) the important thing to know is that mile counts always reset at state lines and so there's no risk of blundering across into Idaho (where the shadows lie) by chasing these things around.

That may seem like a lot of surviving mileposts, given the originals were made with 1910s reinforced concrete and not stone. It turns out most of the ones you'll see out there are replacements that only date to the 1980s, which was practically yesterday. But -- crucially -- a couple of them did survive from way back when, and the new replacements copy the originals' design, and -- also crucially -- they didn't explain which two are the originals so it could be any of them, and the only way to be sure you have photos of these important historical artifacts is to find all of them. (Or, I guess, you could just call up ODOT and ask, but where's the fun in that?)

So with all of that background out of the way, the first milepost we encounter on the way east is Milepost 17, which is located along a shady shoulder of the highway around 1/3 mile past the Stark St. Bridge, before the entrance to Dabney State Park. Note that the shoulder is actually marked No Parking, I think because parking here would let a few visitors stroll into the park and scratch their disc golf itch without paying. So if you just pull off the road briefly to take photos of a concrete milepost, this will probably not lead to getting tasered by The Man, though you never know.

I think another thing I'll do for these posts is list some "nearby attractions", and sort of figure out what that means on the fly. (I think Wordpress is able to do that automagically based on geotags, but Google yoinked most of their Blogger engineers away to go build Google+ before they got around to building this.) Anyway, here's what's nearby:

• An old post about the Stark St. Bridge, currently closed for emergency repairs.
• Flickr photos from Dabney State Park right here, since the related blog post isn't done yet. And I could swear I have more material than the two short video clips in that set. I think I must have mis-filed them somewhere.
• Some very obscure seasonal waterfalls across the highway from Dabney, like this one maybe 300 feet past the milepost.
• A short distance past the entrance to Dabney, at the intersection with Nielson Rd., is the site of "Dabney Springs" aka "Troutdale Springs". Which until quite recently was another minor relic of the old highway, a free-flowing water fountain installed by the state Highway Commission sometime in the early years of the old highway, as a source of radiator water for your poor overheated Model T Ford. Decades later, local hippies decided it was a source of pure mountain spring ambrosia, unsullied by The Man and his chlorinated fluoridated dihydrogen-monoxidated corporate mainstream "water". Even though the water flowed out of an iron pipe, embedded in a big concrete block, and the state never actually said where the water came from or even promised that it was safe for humans to drink. Eventually (sometime earlier this year) this attracted enough hippies to become a regular traffic hazard -- I dunno, maybe they kept twirling in the street or something -- and The Man came and shut it all down. I don't have a post about this or any photos of it or anything, but a recent ZehnKatzen Times post has all the details here.
• Flickr photos from the obscure Stark St. Viaduct, another HCRH-style bridge uphill from the bridge on the Sandy River. That post isn't done yet either.
• If you crossed the Stark St. bridge and then turned left instead of right onto the HCRH, and continued around the bend in the river, you'll soon be at Keanes Creek Falls and the former Tippy Canoe dive bar, and past there a series of small roadside waterfalls on the way to central Troutdale.

The Cherry Trees at NW 19th & Lovejoy, January 2022

One of my longer-running traditions here involves an annual, or sorta-annual, mid-January visit to a trio of early-blooming cherry trees in NW Portland, at the corner of NW 19th Avenue & Lovejoy St. I've been doing this since the late 2000s, and I spent several of the early installments trying to figure out what sort of magic was at work here, such that springtime seemed to arrive at this one streetcorner months before anywhere else in the city, and did so like clockwork year after year. As I mentioned in the 2018 edition, the most likely explanation seems to be that they're ordinary examples of a winter-blooming variety of cherry tree. In other words, although they seem to survive perfectly well here, their DNA is still coded for a warmer climate zone, somewhere where there might be a few pollinators out buzzing around this time of year. Then in 2019 I stumbled across another, larger group of cherry trees that appears to bloom even earlier than the Lovejoy ones, just a few blocks away on NW Overton near 24th. So the traditional spot wasn't even particularly unique, on top of everything else. Then I skipped the last couple of years due to pandemics and family medical stuff, and nearly forgot this time around. Forgetting would have been understandable, given that 2018 was several geological eons ago, or at least it feels that way. But I remembered, just barely, and made a quick visit, and here are the photos to prove it. It still wasn't quite like the Before Times; the usual streetcar ride and extended brewpub detour were in the cards this time, thanks to the currently-rampaging Omicron variant, so instead I just drove to the trees, parked without feeding the meter, took a few quick photos, and got out, mission accomplished. Still, I was happy to see the old trees again, doing their usual thing in the midst of yet another long, cold, dark winter. Which in the end is the entire point of doing this, not just to keep a long series going on a weird little website almost nobody reads.

Now, you might've noticed that these photos were taken a week ago, and wondered how it could possibly have taken me a week to write a couple of paragraphs about some flowers. This time around I thought I had this post almost done and ready to go, and then it occurred to me that I had never done the thing I often do for intersection paintings and that sort of thing, which is to plug the intersection name or street address into the local library's newspaper database, to see whether anything interesting or newsworthy ever happened around here. That sometimes comes up with a few interesting results, and this time was no exception, so it stretched out the effort on this post by a bit. So here's what I've got:

The earliest result for "19th and Lovejoy" that came back was from September 1910, when a tent in a vacant lot here would serve as a polling place in that year's primary election. That was immediately followed by real estate ads for a couple of years, touting the lot's prime location and large 100' by 100' dimensions. This was in turn followed by construction of the Royal Arms Apartments building (the adjacent brick building that sometimes appears cherry photos I take here, though none this year) in 1914. An ad for the building in August of that year describes it:

A building of class and refinement, five-story fireproof brick, covering 100x100 ft, on corner, among the homes of wealth and culture, with their beautiful gardens, trees, and shrubbery, and a grand panoramic view of the city and hills to delight the eye. All apartments have hardwood floors, telephones, latest lighting fixtures and all up-to-date conveniences. Otis automatic elevator with safety appliance; rooms large, with plenty light, ventilation, and closet space; prices moderate; reference required. For reservations apply on premises. Take either 16th st or “S” car north to Lovejoy St.

That December, a local timber baron bought the whole building as a $165,000 Christmas gift for his wife. It had been built for around $100k, per an article the previous month, so the original investors made out pretty well. He died just two years later, and the news story mentions the extravagant gift at length. The building went on to appear regularly in high society news items for a while. Important teas were hosted there regularly, and wedding announcements for young smart-set couples often noted they would be honeymooning overseas and then taking up residence at the Royal Arms upon their return, that sort of thing.

While this was going on, much of the world was embroiled in World War I. The United States intially stayed out of it, and was still largely unready after being dragged in in 1917. By July of that year, the US was slowly remembering out how to do some of the basics, like how to draft people into your army when you know you'll run out of willing volunteers before long. The first batch of draft notices since the Civil War went out with great fanfare, with the Oregonian devoting a couple of pages to printing the names and addresses of everyone local whose numbers had been drawn. I suppose to make it harder to weasel out of trench duty. A young man who lived at 19th & Lovejoy happened to be in the group whose number was drawn 21st, partway down the first column of the first page. Which sounds like bad news, but the paper noted that the men listed wouldn't be called up immediately as there were just enough volunteers to meet the immediate need. By December of that year they had still hadn't been called up; it seems the process to apply for a draft exemption had been bungled somehow and everyone who had applied would have to reapply, and they couldn't actually take in any of the potential draftees until that bit of paperwork had been resolved. The Oregonian took this opportunity to again print the names of everyone who had been listed back in July. I haven't searched WWI service records to see of any of these people were ever actually called up, but it looks like the kid from right here went on and lived to 1959, so one way or another he had made it out of the year 1918 and its various hazards. Which included a deadly flu pandemic, let's not forget. My own maternal grandfather had a similar experience around the same time, though in his case they decided his name was just too long and too German, and his services would not be required along the Western Front after all. So they ordered him to go work at Bethlehem Steel instead, and apparently forgot all about him at that point. Before long he decided steel mill work didn't suit him and quit, although they had never actually told him whether he was allowed to quit or not, and I haven't been able to find a definitive answer on that point either. Nobody ever came around looking for him, though.

Anyway, the Royal Arms high society stuff sort of tapered off with the Depression, and the building was sold in 1940 for 'just' $75,000. The news item was accompanied by a photo of the building, which shows different (and much taller) trees standing where the cherries are now, matching the trees along the front of the building along Lovejoy.

After WWII the building was largely in the news for catching on fire every now and then. Once in 1956, two times in 1960, and then a five-alarm fire in July 1978, in which the buildng's fire alarm system failed to work. Twenty-two injuries were reported, including fifteen firefighters. A photo elsewhere in the paper shows the outside of the building, partly blackened by smoke, and you can kind of make out what looks to be a couple of the present-day cherry trees, smaller and looking a bit worse for wear. Though whether that was due to the fire or the firefighters I don't know. An August news item called the fire a case of arson, while a September story said it was caused by a careless smoker. (The rest of that story concerns another NW Portland building with the same owner also catching on fire.) The building eventually reopened in 1980 after being restored with PDC money, and I don't see any further news reports about the place bursting into flame, which is always good to see.

And in historical entertainment news, in March 1961 actress Jane Russell came to Portland for a week or two, staying at the Royal Arms while making public appearances and doing charity work by day, and performing nightly at the city's Bali Hai Club by night. Russell was also invited to serve as grand marshal of the city's St. Patrick's Day parade a few days later. In a small blurb a few days before she arrived, the paper's nightclub entertainment column (a thing that once existed) described the upcoming residence: "March 8: Jane Russell will grace the Bali Hai stage — singing we imagine, or does it make any difference?". After she arrived in town, the Oregonian took a British journalist's reporting on her arrival and -- finding it a bit too snide to print unedited -- had one of their columnists insert parenthetical comments into it. A couple of days later the nightlife column affirmed that Russell's show was obviously the biggest live entertainment thing in the city but neglected to describe it in any detail, just saying "Need we say more?". The paper's TV and radio columnist managed a bit better, scoring a brief interview at the old Trader Vic's at the Benson as Russell stopped by for a late breakfast (as in 5pm, seeing as her nightly shows ran to around 2am.) The interview was cut short, though, as the writer had to hurry off to an Oregon Historical Society roundable about the Civil War. And was roundly mocked for doing so by the other roundtable participants.

As for the other three corners at the intersection, apparently one used to have a service station, from at least 1935 thru sometime in the 50s or maybe later. I know this because of endless help-wanted classified ads, and a 1935 ad announcing they had been chosen as Texaco's exclusive regional distributor for diesel and fuel oil. Which sounds important, I guess, though they don't explain how big their region was. Other than that, there's nothing of interest to share about the old gas station, but figured I should mention it, as you generally do want to know where old gas stations used to be, in case of forgotten underground tanks and so forth.

Oh, and one of the corners, and I'm not sure which one, was briefly home to Portland's very first modern fast food restaurant. In 1954, a burger place called "Scotty's Self-Service Drive In" opened here, bringing California's 19-cent hamburger craze to the Northwest. (The "self-service" in the name is never explained. I think free refills only appeared in the 1980s so it probably wasn't that.) So here's a large ad from November 1955 celebrating the would-be chain's second location at 12th & Sandy, highlighting their new 39-cent fish and chips (not available at the Lovejoy location), along with a plug for Scotty's Famous Forty-Fiver, which was a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake for 45 cents, now available with or without onions. A 1956 ad offered a fried half-chicken with fries for 89 cents, or for a quarter you could get something called a "Curly Dog", whatever it was (Tagline: "It's new! It's different! It's delicious!"). That ad doesn't mention the original Lovejoy location anymore, so it may have been gone already by then. The Sandy location lasted until at least 1973, per a tiny news item about a robbery, but was apparently gone by 1985 as it was mentioned as a defunct competitor in an article about the last Yaw's closing. A 1985 article about the fading remnants of 1950s hot rod car culture and the closing of another burger place -- the Speck, at SE 50th & Foster -- actually mentions Scotty's as the beginning of the end. As in, the replacement of classic 50s drive-ins by the modern fast food industry. To those of us a generation or two removed from those days this seems like a minor distinction, as they all served more or less the same menu, though maybe at different price points. It sounds like it was more of a cultural shift than a culinary one, with the newcomers being less welcoming toward bored teens lounging around in their parking lots all evening, revving their engines and generally being juvenile and delinquent. And you couldn't just go somewhere else that wasn't a drive-in and still have the same teen culture, I guess. That would be like 80s teen culture without suburban shopping malls. It's just unthinkable.

Anyway, that was our semi-brief foray into the history books. I was kind of hoping the trees were original to the building, but at least I have a rough possible range, sometime between 1940 and 1978. Which, depending on who you believe, makes them either very old or very young trees. An SFGate article says they generally live around 16-20 years, and the Iowa State Extension Service gives a lifespan of just 10-15 years in that state's harsher climate. A Town & Country article on the famous cherry trees in DC gives an average range of 30-40 years, but notes that a few dozen present-day trees are survivors from the original batch of trees in 1912, and mentions that some black cherry trees have lived to at least 250 years old. Which brings us to Japan, where one famous example is thought to be around 2000 years old, and the others on an official list of the Five Great Cherry Trees of Japan are only relative youngsters at around 1000-1500 years old. So, assuming these are the same trees as in the 1978 photo, can conclude that either these trees are already ancient survivors long past their usual die-by date, or they're still practically infants that could, in theory, potentially live beyond the year 4000 AD. I mean, that's unlikely to happen but just imagine it for a moment. And however that eventually turns out, the trees did already survive a five-alarm fire, which is not something you can say of many trees of any variety. So there's that.

Old Boneyard Road

Our next Columbia Gorge adventure takes us back to the former mill town of Bridal Veil, or what's left of it. This time around we aren't visiting the falls, or the bridge above the falls, or the Angels Rest Trail, or Dalton Point, or any of the other usual sights; this time we're wandering down an old gravel Forest Service road at the edge of town, a place the agency calls "Old Boneyard Road". Who am I kidding, I saw the name and had to check it out. Knowing, as I do, how this always turns out in the movies -- "Blair witch, you say? Let's make a documentary!" -- I still had to check it out. So I did, and was underwhelmed, and I also couldn't find any interesting stuff to share about the place, so once again I'm resorting to the usual mix of guesswork, wild tangents, and unbelievable stories I just made up, and hopefully readers can tell which is which. I figured the name might work as a little clickbait, at least; I even held off finishing this post until late October, on the theory it might drive more clicks now than it would if posted in April, say. To be honest I mostly stopped caring about metrics years ago and will probably forget to ever check whether this theory of mine panned out. But never mind all that; we're here now, and I'll see if I can make the place seem at least a little spooky while I'm at it.

The usual embedded Google map up top isn't very helpful this time around, and on Street View it looks like the first couple of photos in my photoset but even less artsy, so here's a US Forest Service road map to give a better idea of where the road is at and where it goes. (That link goes to an interactive version of the USFS map, since I can't seem to embed the real thing here.)

Finding the road in real life takes a keen eye. The spot where it branches off the historic highway is marked only by an easy-to-miss Forest Service road sign noting this is road number 3000-297, and an unusually wide bit of shoulder on the other side of the highway. Surprisingly the road's not actually gated off, so in theory you could drive down it and maybe get past the muddy parts that way, but I wouldn't recommend it; your best bet is to just park in that shoulder area and walk the rest of the way, and turn around if it's too muddy since you aren't really missing anything. Past the sign, the road heads downhill into a narrow, triangular bit of land wedged between the old highway and the Union Pacific railroad, fording Dalton Creek on the way. As it nears the railroad, the road splits: A bit heading east peters out into a small meadow almost immediately, with impassable brush east of there. (A 1927 Metsker map showed the road continuing east from there and rejoining the old highway, but it was gone as of the 1944 edition of the same map.) The main road does a hairpin bend and heads west, but soon turns into impassable mud where it recrosses Dalton Creek. Maps show the road continuing west for a bit after that before dead-ending near the property line with the ODOT's rock quarry next door. Overall it gives the impression it was once an access road for something that used to be here, but gives no hints about what that was, unless maybe the name is a hint.

I first saw the name in a pair of Forest Service road studies, the 2003 original and its 2015 update. They're large (since they cover all USFS roads within the National Scenic Area) and quite dry to read, so let me summarize briefly. The 2003 report said the road was "needed by state government", while posing a "high" risk to aquatic life. The 2015 update said the need for the road was now "low" (and was merely a "low" risk to aquatic life), and proposed downgrading it from maintenance level 2 (suitable for high clearance vehicles) down to level 1 (gated off, with minimal maintenance), commenting "Consider decommissioning. This road has two stream crossings and flooding is occurring on the lower section of the road." So, reading between the lines here, whatever the state was doing here back in 2003 was causing the water quality trouble, and things got better after they stopped, but now the road's redundant. Maybe it used to be a backup quarry entrance, and dump trucks used to roll through the mud here, I dunno. Meanwhile a map titled 'Road Risk/Benefit Assessment', also from September 2015, labeled the road in green as 'Likely Needed for Future Use', so I gather the report's proposal was not a unanimous opinion. In any case the agency defaulted to not changing anything back then, and it still hasn't.

None of which explains the spooky name, which is annoying since the spooky name is the one and only reason we're here. And maybe it's not even a spooky name at all. I'm reasonably sure -- like 75% positive, ok, 51% -- that it's not actually about skeletons, at least not of the Halloween persuasion. Or at least the official old Bridal Veil town cemetery is elsewhere, due west of here over near the Bridal Veil freeway exit. The convent near Coopey Falls has its own cemetery on the convent grounds, so it's not that either; interestingly it -- according to the county surveyor's office -- is legally a "subdivision" named "Transitus". As in "sic transit gloria mundi", I suppose, which in a way follows the long tradition of naming subdivisions after things they replaced. It's said -- and never ask me how I heard about this -- that many Transitus residents return from the Other Side on the last night of each waning crescent moon for the monthly HOA meeting, which -- I'm told -- is conducted entirely in Latin and can get surprisingly heated at times, especially if they think the new groundskeeper has been edging their plots all wrong, or showing favoritism in who gets the most graveside flowers. Some propose a resolution to haunt the new guy until he quits, others remind the residents they've now done this to the last three groundskeepers, and word is starting to get out in the regional groundskeeping community that this is a bad gig, and it's lowering their property values somehow, and the phantasmagorical bickering continues for hours. But after the meeting finally wraps up, the ghostly nuns relax and play bridge til daybreak and then dematerialize back to... wherever they spend the rest of their time. Nobody really knows for sure where they go or how they get there, and it remains a deep mystery of nature (or supernature), along the lines of Atlantic eel migration. But I digress.

Anyway, my guess is that this was some sort of machine boneyard at one point, packed with mechanical bits located somewhere along the "useless junk" <==> "critical spare parts" continuum, like a larger version of my dad's garage. But what kind of machines? There's essentially nothing left now that might give us any clues about that, but I think parts for the old sawmill would be the obvious (albeit evidence-free) guess. So I can't prove it, but searching the interwebs for various logging keywords plus the word "boneyard" led me off on an interesting tangent, so I'll explain that instead for a bit. So if you don't like interesting tangents, just scroll down until you see a paragraph starting with the word "Anyway", and resume reading at that point. Which means there's only one paragraph starting with "Anyway" in the remainder of this post, believe it or not. (And yes, I added an "anyway" to this paragraph later, for ironic effect or whatever. Don't count it while scrolling down, otherwise you're liable to be here for a long while.)

This tangent takes us to a different sawmill down in the mid-Willamette Valley. The Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. operates a very traditional-minded mill near the tiny town of Bellfountain, a few miles west of the small town of Monroe. The mill ran entirely on steam power as recently as 2013, and still uses a lot of early and mid-20th century machinery, on the theory of not fixing it if it ain't broke. They even have an intact old wigwam burner, though it's strictly decorative now since Oregon banned them decades ago. Articles I've seen about the mill include a recent piece in Popular Mechanics, and an older one at OPB, plus others in trade publications like Timber West Magazine, Sawmill Magazine, and This Is Carpentry. One of the articles mentions that finding spare parts can be a big problem, so they watch auctions around the region for gear they might need someday, and sometimes end up bidding against museums. When they win an auction, the parts go to the mill's boneyard until they're needed, which is the reason I bumped into articles about the place.

At one point a few decades ago the mill helped create a unique picnic table for the nearby Bellfountain County Park, 85 feet long and cut from a single piece of wood. Some (including the county parks website) suggest it's the world's longest picnic table, or at least the longest in the "cut from a single piece of wood" category. A state historical record merely claims it "has been referred to as" the longest in that category within the US. (By contrast, the old Bridal Veil mill was best known for manufacturing the little wood boxes that Kraft Cheese used to come in.) Benton County also claims Bellfountain Park is the county's oldest park, founded way back in 1851. Although the county's only run it since 1965, and before that it was a privately-run religious campground used for revival meetings, which is not really a park in the ordinary sense.

Bellfountain's other claim to fame (besides the mill, and the park and its various amenities) is having won the overall state high school basketball championship back in 1937. If you're familiar with the movie Hoosiers or the 1954 true story it was based on, that's essentially what happened here, once upon a time. Like most states, Oregon puts schools in multiple 'divisions', organized more or less by school size and program budget, with a separate championship for each division. There were five divisions when I was in high school, and a sixth was added sometime since then, but back in 1937 there were just two. Class A for big schools, and class B for small schools. But, uniquely, if you won the class B championship in a sport, you had the right to challenge the class A champion for their trophy. Which is how a tiny K-12 school with 27 students once came to play -- and defeat -- Portland's Lincoln High School.

While we're briefly on the subject of high school sports -- briefly, I promise -- in 2020 the town of Monroe had a small cameo role in the state's endless culure wars over high school team names. It seems that they're one of several schools around the state that go by "the Dragons", including the much larger high school in the city of Dallas, OR, and in many cases the name dates back to the early 20th Century. The problematic part here is that there's a longstanding story/legend/rumor that "Dragons" is a sly reference to dragons of the "Grand Dragon" variety, and to Oregon's long history as a Ku Klux Klan hotbed, which peaked back in the 1920s (though I'm cynical enough about this state to consider adding a "so far" here). That suspicion is not helped by both Dallas and Monroe having long reputations as sundown towns. A local website in Dallas insists the stories about the name are untrue, at least in their particular case, and "Dragons" was chosen for a.) alliteration, and b.) because nobody's scared of playing a team that calls itself the "Prune Pickers", the school's previous mascot. Which, maybe. Though I'll just point out that Bellfountain proudly played as the Bells the whole time, and let the name of the town do all the intimidating.

(deep breath)

Anyway, back at Bridal Veil, the place we're actually visiting right now could've been a railroad boneyard instead, since it's right along a major (and very old) Union Pacific rail line, right where the line goes to double track through the old townsite. And I think it's also close to where the mill's old logging railroad once connected to the main line. So this place could've been for old trains and train parts, albeit on a fairly small scale. A quick search came up with examples in remote corners of Maine, New Jersey, Bolivia, and even Ukraine's Chernobyl exclusion zone, all of which are much larger than whatever could have fit here. For the same reason, I think we can rule out "aircraft boneyard" as a possibility since that requires even more space, ideally a large chunk of empty desert like the famous ones in California and Arizona.

Or maybe this area used to be parts storage for ODOT's remarkably well-disguised Coopey Quarry next door. This is the source of at least some of the gravel used to constanly patch up I-84 and the old highway, and an endless need for gravel kind of implies an endless need for spare parts, especially given the agency's legendary reckless enthusiasm for dynamite. In fact the state's 2014 LIDAR map of the area (the source of the graphic above) shows some near-vertical slopes next to the highway that to me don't look entirely natural, but do look a lot like the quarry next door. So maybe some quarrying happened here at one point too. But (as with most of this post) I have zero documentation to prove that; it's just me looking at a map and guessing wildly.

PortlandMaps says the bulk of the area was last sold in 1989, so the feds haven't actually owned the place all that long. I don't know if the deals were connected at all, but 1989 was the same year that the Trust for Public Land bought the ramshackle sawmill and what was left of its company town, and after a long nature vs. historic preservation battle all remaining structures were demolished and erased. Except for the local post office, which continues to do a brisk business in novelty wedding announcement postmarks. Before the 1989 sale, much of the town (and possibly the boneyard site here) had been owned since 1964 by an eccentric ">local NASCAR driver, who (I gather) just sort of liked the idea of owning his own town. But that's a whole separate blog post I'll get around to sooner or later.

I was really hoping there would be something left over from the place's working days, I dunno, rusty old boxcar wheels or steam engine bits or something, giant sawmill blades, sized for trees it isn't legal to cut anymore, etc, but no luck. Or at least I had no luck; maybe if you're a metal detecting expert (and have the appropriate special permit), or you just have better powers of observation than I do, you might be in for a treat. I mean, I think I would have noticed if there'd been, I dunno, an intact vintage locomotive there, hidden under a big blue tarp but fully fueled and ready to joyride, and with the model number visible so you can find the right "How To Drive This Thing" video on Youtube. I didn't see anything like that, so don't get your hopes up too much. In fact the only remaining maybe-artifacts I noticed were a couple of large concrete boxes that I couldn't identify. Maybe they were the only objects that were too heavy to remove, I dunno. I took a few photos (see photoset above) in case they ring a bell for anyone.

Or maybe I've gotten it all wrong. Suppose these concrete mystery boxes are the reason for the "Old Boneyard" name, and it's all about creepy skeletons after all. Suppose a couple of late 19th century vampires were making their way west by train to Portland, nomming on unaware locals as they went, having heard the stories of other vampires living the high life in Portland's North End (present-day Old Town). A place where people constantly vanished, never to be seen or heard from again, generally without anyone noticing or caring. And on the off chance a missing person was actually missed and questions were raised, it could always be explained away as yet another Shanghai-ing, which the public just sort of accepted as a fact of life. But what if a few people here knew the awful truth of the matter; what if the vamps were ambushed when they hopped off the train for a quick midnight snack, just before they could escape into the city and the unmapped tunnels beneath it. Perhaps the townsfolk here got a hot tip about the unwanted visitors via the newfangled telegraph; it might have even been from from a rival vampire in Portland who didn't want the competition, or had a centuries-old score to settle. Bridal Veil lacked many of the traditional anti-vamp tools (garlic, rice, Catholic priests, etc. -- the nearby convent has only been here since the 1980s), but there were plenty of wooden stakes to be had, or at least cheese boxes that could be quickly broken up into stakes. But these were vampires of the type that are merely immobilized when staked, not the exploding Buffy variety, so a little quick thinking led to entombing them in concrete -- made with 0% Transylvanian soil -- while still staked, and that's where they've stayed ever since, the name being a clue to locals to leave those boxes the hell alone. But then the mill and its town went away, and the residents dispersed to all points of the compass, and certain key details about this place were lost to current generations, and sooner or later someone's going to jackhammer the things open in the interest of making the area more natural. Whoever does this will be in for a big (but brief) surprise, and yet another ancient horror will be unleashed on the world. In fact, this will most likely occur within the next few years, because that's just how the 2020s have been going so far.