Scotts Mills Falls

Next up we're checking out Scotts Mills Falls, in the small city of Scotts Mills, pop. 419 (2020), located about halfway between Molalla and Silverton and a couple of miles east of Highway 213, the most direct line between the two, if that makes any sense. It's also about five miles (as the crow flies) west of Wilhoit Springs, a once-famous place we visited in a recent post, and six from the epicenter of the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Which is one and only thing the town is semi-famous for here in faraway Portland.

The town's little downtown area is bordered to the east by Butte Creek, a large tributary of the Pudding River (no, really, that's what it's called), which meanders around and eventually joins the Willamette somewhere around Canby. The waterfall is right in town... ok, looking closely at Google Maps it looks like the city limit kind of zigzags through the falls, running right along the brink of the falls for a bit and swerving to avoid most of the decrepit low dam just upstream of it, as well as the Marion County park centered on the falls and the old mill pond. Maybe this is to dodge liability for various things, like the occasional drownings here (like one in 2021 a few weeks before I took these photos), or in case the dam collapses before the proposed dam removal finally happens. (As of February 2025 the removal is on hold due to handwringing at the county level.)

I should pause here briefly to note that there's also a Scotts Mills City Park, a few blocks further downstream along the creek, and visitors seem to endlessly confuse the two. A recent one-star Google review complained about the park being overwhelmed with drugs and crime and drinking and illegal overnight camping, which quickly got an indignant reply from an anonymous city staffer, who said the reviewer must be thinking of the nearby county park, which is not the city's problem, and the reviewer should contact the Marion County sheriff's office in case of trouble way out there (a few blocks away).

And if you're more interested in visiting waterfalls than city parks, there are a couple of others further up Butte Creek, namely Upper and Lower Butte Creek Falls. And this the part where I awkwardly point out that I've been there and have photos of both waterfalls and I have no frickin' idea when I might finish the draft posts about them.

If you go browsing around the waterfall maps attached to those pages, you might notice there's one called Bear Creek Falls in the general vicinity. I haven't been to that one, but I gather it's a bit underwhelming, and (more importantly) it has one fairly ominous-sounding one-star Google review: "Stay away would rather not have new people around". I am probably not alone in noticing that people in deep rural parts of the state seem to be a lot more hostile since the pandemic. I could be wrong here, but as I understand it, city folks and other outsiders were never exactly welcome out in the woods, but at least they were a good traditional source of meat for your family, and no pesky bag limit, either. But then COVID came along, and now the odds are pretty good you might chow down on some vaccinated folks this way and get a belly full of those gosh-dang confernal 5G nanobots for your trouble. It's not hard to see why the locals would be feeling a bit ornery after dealing with all that.

Anyway... the dam is obviously very old, but nobody seems to agree on its exact age. The county Soil & Water Conservation District says it was built by PGE for hydropower in 1917 and then abandoned in 1954 after it was damaged by a flood and judged not worth fixing. A 2019 article about the dam at OurTown Community News (a local news site) says it was built between 1860 and 1870. A 2020 Salem Statesman-Journal article says it's from the 1850s, and an article at SHINE on Salem (a history site about Marion County) notes that a mill was built here in 1846, and the dam was already in place at that point.

So who knows, really. Maybe the dam has always been there. Maybe Bigfoot built it for hydropower, countless millennia ago, back before the Ice Age floods wiped away all other traces of their highly advanced society. Or maybe it's much older than that, even, and it was built by the sentient dinosaurs from that one Voyager episode, but way back in their medieval days, long before they escaped the coming asteroid and headed off to wander the galaxy. And what if the dam was built to imprison some kind of ancient evil deep beneath the mill pond for the last 65 million years, and demolishing the dam would unleash a new plague of zombo-raptors against our unprepared world. And what if the present-day locals know all about this somehow, maybe through some kind of hidden device that still transmits occasional warning dreams of that ancient lost age. Although of course you can't say that in front of the county commissioners, or the state salmon regulators, or any of the other outsiders, people who would just laugh at you, people who have never dozed off after a picnic near the dam on a lazy afternoon and then had The Dream. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but it would certainly explain all the local opposition to removing the dam.

Naturally the city's history page mentions none of that but does relate a curious detail about the town's early days. Starting in 1888, the Oregon Land Development Co. promoted the town as a Quaker-friendly town and persuaded people to move there on that basis, and promised various modern urban amenities that never panned out. The company eventually went under in 1902, bringing financial ruin to a lot of residents. Maybe I'm just a cynic in assuming it was a scam the entire time. Fourteen years is an exceptionally long time to wait for a log con to pan out. On the other hand, if you set out planning to swindle an entire town out of their life savings, it's always safer to swindle a bunch of pacifists.

More history and related news from across the greater Scotts Mills metro area:

• The very first mention of the town in the Oregonian was back in 1877, in connection with a homicide case. In which a witness testified that he had never even heard of Scott's Mills.
  
• On a brighter note, here's a March 1893 blurb on the then-flourishing Quaker colony. We're told they were trying their hand at growing grapes. They were about a century ahead of their time, I guess.
  
• The SHINE page up above mentions that the town's boom times in the early 20th century were due to three pillars of the economy: The mills, obviously, along with prune growing, and "mining speculation". And yes, as a matter of fact I do have a bunch of old news links about what that means, exactly:
  
• July 1907, the Journal breathlessly reported that coal had been discovered somewhere near Scotts Mills, it was of the very finest quality, and the recently-formed Diamond Coal Company would have it on the Portland market soon, undercutting the other available options.
  
• the next month, news came that a branch rail line was coming soon, and this line would haul Scotts Mills coal to market and bring general commerce and progress and whatnot to town, though the actual mining would have to wait for a bit until they could find enough skilled miners, apparently.
  
• in the middle of coal fever, August 1908 saw a failed scam attempt that ended up in court. Seems that one D.C. Forbes tried to interest a couple of local businessmen in his amazing new gold-finding widget, after salting the mine in question with just enough gold to make it demo well. After a couple of days employing the device at the mine, Forbes feigned illness and left. Normally this is the point where a professional swindler would skip town with his jackpot, grow a luxurious handlebar mustache (or shave it off if he currently sports one), and then resurface in Colorado as "A.G. Williamson", inventor of a miracle gold-finding gadget. But Forbes screwed it up: The local marks were at least a little skeptical and only agreed to lease the device for 30 days to test it out properly, saying they'd buy it if they were satisfied at that point. (Note to scammers: Never agree to this, especially if your device doesn't work.) Which meant Forbes had to stick around another 30 days without their money, and somehow string the marks along and keep them thinking the device was working the whole time. Seeding the mine with a month's gold production would've been prohibitively expensive, so I'm not sure how he intended to pull this off. In any event, the unsatisfied customers declined to buy the gizmo. (Note to scammers: This would have been another good point to slink away emptyhanded and try again elsewhere, if you haven't already.) Ah, but Forbes was a very persistent man, and decided to sue his escaped prey, asking the court to make them pay up. He also accused the pair of seeding the mine themselves in order to sell it or attract unwary investors, although he had no actual evidence they had tried doing so.
• Court case had been filed a few days earlier. An article on August 26th covers the claims of the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. against the pair

• August 28th longer article summarizing (and snarking about) the case:

  Peculiarly enough the public’s only interest in this mining venture is one of morbid curiosity. The public has no equity in the company’s lands or bonanzas. It is one of the very few cases on record where everybody gets hurt except the dear old public.
  
  ...
  
  Stripping these papers of their superfluous verbiage, the public is able to get an excellent idea of the modus operandi in mining bonanzas of a certain class.

  Apparently Mr. Swift (one of the two local investors) was very eager to start touting mining stock, even though the very existence of any actual gold here was currently being argued in court. Which is another hint that their operation was not exactly above board either.

• A January 1909 item recounts the competing claims in the case.
• A ruling came the next day, essentially tossing everyone out of the courtroom emptyhanded. First, no persuasive evidence had been introduced that anyone had seeded the mine, so the mine's proprietors couldn't collect on that count. And as for the 30 day try-before-u-buy arrangement, Forbes and his firm had never actually gotten this in writing.
• Two years later in June 1909, the Oregonian finally caught wind of the still-imminent coal mine, and reported breathlessly about it. That's the last we hear of the coal scheme in the paper.
• A related gold-mining case was still ongoing in December 1911, however. This time one of the three partners in the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. was suing the other two. The judge became fed up with all parties to the dispute and dismissed the case, declaring "he was not sitting in equity for the purpose of dividing spoils among thieves". He then declared that one of the defendants in this civil case really ought to be indicted for forgery and imprisoned, and personally walked over to the DA's office to persuade him to do so. Though I couldn't find any news on how that followup case had gone.
• However there were a few appearances of a Portland-based Diamond Coal Co. in the news in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's not clear whether it was the same company. If so, they got a new delivery truck in 1920, and experienced several failed burglaries starting in 1929.
• A 1948 article related the story of Ted Mandrones, who had been quietly mining coal in the Wilhoit Springs area as a virtual one-man operation for much of the last decade, trying to convince skeptics and find investors for his operation.
• Er, meanwhile, the fish ladder here dates back all the way to 1924, or at least that was the date on the first one, which may or may not be the current one.
• A 1932 Journal article notes Scotts Mills was on the road to Moss Lake, where (we're told) aquatic plants grew in such a thick, dense layer that you could walk on it, and reportedly it could even sustain the weight of an adult bear. This layer was supported in part by swamp gas, such that a lit match would burn briefly like you were lighting a gas stove. Which seems like an unwise thing to do while standing on this aquatic plant layer, unless maybe a bear is chasing you. Google has a location for this natural wonder here, but the only visible lake on the map is here, about a mile to the SE of where Google thinks it is. It seems to fit the description -- steep sides around the lake, floating biomass seemingly on the surface, in the upper Butte Creek watershed, with a nearby road named "Moss Lane" just off Crooked Finger Road. Looks like it's had a few nearby clearcuts in recent decades, and the lake is only maybe 1/4 covered now, versus nearly entirely so in 1932.
• 1967, Clackamas County was given three acres of land constituting 1000' of frontage along Butte Creek, about four miles upstream from Scotts Mills, to be known as the "Fryberger Wayside". Which I don't see any record of on the interwebs, but that wouldn't be the first chunk of Clackamas-owned parkland they've forgotten or lost track of. Can think of a couple along the Sandy River off the top of my head that don't appear on their official list.
• 1988 story, the park was closed temporarily by the county sheriff due to fights between hispanic and anglo residents. The paper interviewed several people with Anglo names relating a variety of lurid incidents they had either seen or heard local rumors about, like people going to the park to wash laundry in the creek. In nearby Silverton the city council had recently voted to deport the town's non-citizen hispanic population, estimated at several hundred people, only to find out there was currently a federal moratorium in place on deporting agricultural workers.
• 2004 Foster Church column, just sort of wandering around Molalla and surrounding towns in the dead of winter, chatting up the locals. He did stop in Scotts Mills for a bit but look at the falls for a bit.

Butteville Riverboat Landing

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Some photos of Butteville Riverboat Landing, at historic Butteville on the south bank of the Willamette between Champoeg and Wilsonville. Butteville is best known for the Butteville Store, which is supposedly the oldest continuously operating business in the state. It probably doesn't hurt that the store sits at one end of the Champoeg State Park trail system and (I assume) sells water and snacks. It turns out, though, that Butteville was once a small but thriving river port, and a few remnants of those days survive to the present time. About a block directly downhill from the store, toward the river, a sign says "PUBLIC ACCESS" and names the spot as "Butteville Riverboat Landing Marion County Historic Site". Beyond it is a narrow parcel of land sandwiched between two houses, with a short trail leading to the river and some concrete remnants that may have been a dock at one point. I assume this means the county owns the land in some capacity, although Marion County Parks doesn't say a word about it. Possibly it still falls under the Ferries department, but I'm really not sure. In any event, the key thing is that it's a public river access point, whoever technically owns it.

An excerpt from the fascinating book Willamette Landings describes Butteville thusly:

Butteville (aka LaButte). On the south side or east shore of the river. Established in the 1840s by George Abernethy and Alanson Beers, it was little more than a river landing, with a warehouse and a few dwellings. During the flood of 1861 it incurred extensive damage. By the 1870s, most of the local agriculture was being shipped via the Oregon & California Railroad which had been constructed several miles to the east.

Which is more or less the story we see all along the Willamette River: A locality along the river sorta-thrived briefly, only to be killed off by some combination of floods and railroads. In Butteville's case it wasn't completely the end though; after commercial traffic up and down the river petered out, the town was still home to ferry traffic across the river for a while. a 1905 photo shows a town that appears larger than today's sleepy Butteville. The caption reads:

This is Butteville in 1905. The town site is located on the Willamette River about sixteen miles south of Oregon City. The road leads downhill to the former Butteville Ferry dock.

To this day, there's a street named "Butteville Ferry Road" directly on the far side of the river. That's usually a good clue.

A 1910 photo shows a different but similar waterfront, with the caption:

This photograph is of a picture of the waterfront at Butteville, Oregon on the Willamette River in northern Marion County. The town is mentioned in journals as early as 1845 and was variously known as Butes and La Butte in the mid-1800's when it was a busy shipping point for wheat and other valley crops. Its business district encompassed several blocks and its events were reported up and down the valley. When the Oregon & California Railroad was routed several miles to the east in 1871, the agricultural products which had previously gone by river were shipped by rail and the town gradually began to decline. This picture, taken in 1910, shows pilings at the waterfront and few frame buildings on the road into town. The original photograph is from the collection of Captain Eckhart.

Finally, a 1954 photo from the Butteville side of the river shows a quiet scene, with a few decayed pilings that look like those in the earlier photos. The photo caption:

Butteville is located about nine miles south of Oregon City and was staked out about 1845 by George Abernethy & Alanson Beers. In 1895 it had 4 stores, 4 warehouses, blacksmiths, 3 saloons, and a ferry across the Willamette River. Two steamboats called daily; it was an important trade center & shipping point until near the turn of the century. In October 1954, the ferry landing was no longer in use and the town was nearly a ghost town.

The book A History of Oregon Ferries since 1826 indicates ferry service existed intermittently at Butteville into the early 20th century, and includes the 1905 photo as documentation. It seems the first recorded Butteville Ferry sailed in 1851. In 1857 it became known as Hibbard's Ferry when a gentleman by that name was licensed to operate for one year. In 1860, the Vaughn Ferry plied its trade here, as did the Curtis Ferry circa 1870-72, the Schwartz Ferry in 1913, and the Scheurer Ferry in 1915-16. The last citation refers to Butteville city council minutes, meaning this little burg was an actual incorporated city at that time.

Union Street Bridge

A slideshow on Salem's Union Street Bridge over the Willamette River. It was built as a railroad bridge in 1913, but the railroad abandoned it in the 1990s. The city of Salem later purchased it and converted it into a bike and pedestrian bridge. Which, as you can see in my earlier posts about the nearby Center Street and Marion Street bridges, is something that was sorely needed here. I visited on a cool, drizzly day with intermittent downpours, and even then there was a steady stream of people walking and biking across.

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If the design of the bridge looks familiar, it could be because it was designed by the Waddell & Harrington engineering firm, the same company behind the Hawthorne, Interstate, and Steel bridges in Portland. Unlike the bridges in Portland, the lift span on the Union St. Bridge no longer functions. In fact it hasn't been operational since at least 1980, when the railroad was still using the bridge.

There was a brief time in the late 1990s or early 2000s when it looked as if the lift span would have to be repaired, to accomodate the Willamette Queen river cruise ship during high river levels. I can't find a definitive link about the story, but as I recall under federal law the railroad would have had to put the lift span back into operation if any commercial user demanded it. However it turned out to be much cheaper to modify the riverboat, the only vessel that would have needed the lift span. Its smokestacks were the real obstacle, and they were actually purely decorative, so they were given hinges to fold down so the ship could fit under the bridge. As I said, I wish I had a link to pass along as I might have some of the details of the story wrong, but that's how the story played out as best as I can recall. Anyway, the lift span is another interesting relic of the brief era when commercial shipping was a dominant form of transportation across Oregon, before railroads and eventually cars and trucks assumed that role.

Since it's strictly a pedestrian and bike bridge, walking across is pretty pleasant, and there's a nice view of the river and the other bridges. You see a bit of the city too, but Salem has a fairly low-rise and unphotogenic skyline, apart from the state capitol, and the city just isn't oriented around the river to the same degree that Portland is. In addition to the bridge itself, on the West Salem side of the river you also cross a long elevated train trestle over land; I was coming from the downtown Salem side and turned around before walking the whole trestle (due to the whole intermittent downpours thing I mentioned), so I haven't personally seen where it ends up. The video I linked to above starts from the West Salem side, though, so you can see it that way, if you're curious.

Marion Street Bridge

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The next bridge in the ongoing project is Salem's Marion Street Bridge. Built in 1952, it's somewhat more attractive than the Center St. Bridge, but it's still not what I'd call a visual treat. The bridge supports have a sort of pointed arch motif to them, similar to Portland's St. Johns Bridge, but in this case I'm not really sure why. Maybe the designer was just a big fan of pointed arches.

One downside of being built in 1952 is that the pedestrian walkway (there's only one, on the north side of the bridge) is pretty narrow. I tend to assume that midcentury bridges are like this because designers figured nobody would walk anywhere in the future. I can't prove that, but it sounds kind of reasonable to me. Anyway, it's narrower than the Center St. bridge walkway, and walking across is just as noisy due to the heavy traffic. I did a loop starting on the Salem side, across the Center St. and back across the Marion St., and I'd have to say the only reason to do this (other than as your daily commute, I suppose) would be purely for the sake of completeness. I'd be very surprised if this pops up on anyone's list of Top 10 Things To Do In Salem.

Just to verify that, I started searching the net for Top 10 lists about Salem. Here's one, which doesn't mention anything about bridges. It does mention going to Portland as #7 on the list, which seems like cheating to me. It also mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum, which sits next to the west end of the Marion St. Bridge. So you'll at least see the bridge, and maybe even park next to a pointed arch. So there's that. Another Top 10 list is less helpful; it's either auto-generated, or was compiled by someone who'd never been to Salem. As far as it's concerned your options are either guided walking tours (lots of them), or river rafting. And not all of the options are even in Oregon. So you can probably ignore that list. A top 5 list actually mentions a lot more than five things to do. It even shows a covered bridge, and mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum. But again, nothing about Willamette River bridges. So apparently this is our little secret for the time being, o Gentle Reader(s). (We really need to come up with cooler secrets, quite honestly.)

Center Street Bridge

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge project takes us south to Salem's Center Street Bridge. The present-day bridge is pretty boring; the one semi-interesting detail is that it's the fourth bridge at this location (the part about bridges is somewhat down the page):

1. Built in 1880, the first Center Street Bridge was the very first bridge over the Willamette River. It was short-lived, however, collapsing during a flood in 1890.
2. The 1891 replacement was built in a hurry and was considered structurally unsound almost from the day it opened. It still took the city almost 20 years to replace it, however.
3. The 1918 bridge lasted much longer than its predecessors; it was renovated in 1953 after the Marion St. Bridge opened downstream of it, and was finally demolished in 1969.
4. The current bridge dates to around 1969 or so. It's actually kind of hard to find reliable information about it. The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the current bridge dates to 1918, even though a quick glance makes it obvious that this isn't the case.

The bridge is four lanes of eastbound traffic, with a pedestrian walkway on the north side, protected from vehicles by a concrete barrier. There's a long spiral ramp up to the bridge from the Salem waterfront, while on the West Salem side the walkway descends into a tangle of highway exits and underpasses. I haven't tried locating the walkway from that side, but I expect it's kind of challenging if you don't already know where it is.

There's suprisingly little to see while walking across the bridge. You see the city's two other bridges downstream, and trees along the riverbanks, and the tops of some low-rise buildings, but Salem is really not oriented toward the river. It hasn't been a commercial port for many decades now, and the idea of chic riverfront cafes doesn't appear to have caught on. Certain Salem-based relatives would argue that the idea of chic anything would have a hard time catching on in Salem -- but I don't live there and I honestly don't know the place that well, so I'm not going to editorialize. I do have a link to pass along though; after the debut of IFC's Portlandia, Salem residents on Twitter began speculating about what a "Salemia" show would be like. The results were pretty amusing, though a bit depressing.

For some reason, one of the conventions around this ongoing bridge project involves warning you about various implausible hazards that might befall you while innocently strolling across the bridge. Based on past history, the most likely candidate would be the city deciding it's time to build the fifth Center Street Bridge, and start demolishing the current one while you're still on it. It's not a city that does anything quickly, though. There's a current proposal out there to build an additional bridge in the greater Salem area, and it'll be years before they'll even break ground on it, if they ever do. So chances are you'll have had plenty of warning -- months or years, probably -- plus I just told you there was a miniscule but nonzero chance it might happen. So can't say you weren't warned.

Wheatland Ferry

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Today's episode in what's apparently now a bridge and ferry project takes us to the Wheatland Ferry, a few miles north/downstream of Salem, OR at the tiny town of Wheatland. It's the same basic idea as the Canby Ferry, but busier; you pay while the boat's moving instead of prior to departure, probably to shave off a few minutes at the dock. At peak times -- summer and harvest time, primarily -- traffic tends to back up waiting to use the ferry. As this is the only river crossing of any kind between downtown Salem and the OR 219 bridge at Newberg, the Wheatland Ferry will likely be replaced with a bridge long before the other remaining Willamette River ferries. Not that it's all that likely in the near term; demand or not, a bridge -- even a utilitarian ugly one -- would still be expensive, and neither the state nor Marion County has a lot of cash lying around.

A 2009 Terry Richard column describes the ferry briefly, although he doesn't have a lot to say about river ferries that I haven't already covered here. There really isn't a lot to cover: You explain where it is, and tell the n00bs how to use the thing, and you might toss in a few snarky non-sequiturs if you happen to be me, which you probably aren't. You'd think there'd be a lot of fascinating history tidbits to share about the thing, given how long there's been a ferry at this location, but I haven't come across any yet.

The ferry does have a sorta-official website, although the page design is a retina-melting throwback to the Geocities/MySpace era. If there's a web browser out there that lets you disable tiled animated-gif background images, that would probably be the one to use. Failing that, welder's goggles would work, or you could try projecting the website onto a wall so that you aren't directly exposing your eyes to it. That's the safe way to observe a solar eclipse, so it might work for this website too. I note, in passing, that the link to their web design firm is a 404. FWIW.