Willamette Falls

A slideshow of Willamette Falls photos, from the viewpoint off 99E on the Oregon City side of the river. This is about the best view you can get of the falls without owning a boat or getting a job at one of the paper mills next to the falls. It's the only industrialized, urban waterfall we have in the area and doesn't fit our usual idea of waterfalls, which are tall, skinny, and mostly untouched by the modern world. So tourist guidebooks to the area often ignore these falls. The closest US analogies I can think of might be the Falls of St. Anthony in Minneapolis; Spokane Falls in Spokane, Wa; and High Falls in Rochester NY.

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Willamette Falls is a significant place in Oregon history, so at the risk of sounding like a third-rate Wikipedia clone (and one that relies heavily on Wikipedia, at that), it feels like I should at least try to relate a few interesting tidbits about the place rather than just going, hey, here's yet another slide show, enjoy.

The waterfall

People who care about these things claim Willamette Falls is somewhat of a big deal: 17th widest waterfall in the world, and 37th largest by volume of water. It would be in the top 20, in fact, except that much of the river is diverted away for hydropower, which we'll get to in a minute.

Fish

Several of the photos in this set show people fishing below the falls. The falls have been a prime fishing spot for migratory fish since time immemorial, primarily salmon and lamprey. Because of this, Willamette Falls and other major waterfalls around the Northwest were major cultural centers for native tribes of the region, and figured prominently in stories and legends. (One appeared here recently in a post about Coalca Landing State Park, explaining the origin of the park's once-famous balancing rock). The tribes retained their traditional fishing rights here after the 1855 treaty in which they lost virtually all of their land. The word "retained" is important here: Despite what the nation's racist uncles may have said over Thanksgiving dinner, this is not a matter of the federal government granting special rights to a minority. They were here first, the falls and the fish were theirs to begin with, and they never gave up their pre-existing rights.

I should note, however, that fishing rights don't guarantee an actual supply of fish. Lamprey populations continue to decline, and salmon runs are no healthier here than they are anywhere else.

History

The falls also explain why Oregon City is where it is. The town was founded in 1829 as a Hudson's Bay Company outpost (the main fort being across the Columbia River at Ft. Vancouver), as the falls were a convenient way to power a lumber mill. It would be several decades before the founding of Portland, so Oregon City was the major settlement in the region and served as the territorial capital. That, in turn, meant that the Oregon Trail ended here, as newly arrived pioneers had to stop by the courthouse to file their land claim papers.

The falls also meant that Oregon City was initially the head of navigation on the Willamette. A number of East Coast cities were founded along the Fall Line, and it would have been reasonable to think the pattern would repeat here as well. Ships couldn't go any further upstream, and moving products by land in the pre-rail, pre-paved road era was difficult and something you wanted to minimize if possible, so it seemed logical that a seaport would develop here. Portland soon took this role away from Oregon City, however; the credit's often given to (relatively) easier land routes, particularly the old Plank Road west to the farmland of the Tualatin Valley. This later evolved into Canyon Road, and then today's Sunset Highway (US 26).

Transportation

The falls didn't remain a barrier for long; in 1873 the Willamette Falls Locks opened, giving river traffic a route around the falls. They were initially a private venture but later became an Army Corps of Engineers project.

Over time river traffic lost out to the railroads, and both dwindled further once paved roads and motor vehicles arrived in the Northwest. The falls saw very little traffic in recent years and maintenance costs continued to escalate, so the Corps finally placed the locks in "non-operating status" in 2011. This seems to be bureaucratic lingo for "permanently closed" without actually saying "permanent".

Power

People in the Northwest usually think of hydroelectric power as something that involves a massive Bonneville-style dam, but Willamette Falls is home to PGE's historic Thomas W. Sullivan Plant, which has just a low dam above the falls to divert water into its turbines. Constructed in 1895, it's one of the nation's oldest hydropower plants still in operation, and was recently certified as "green power", which seems to mean that it's considered relatively benign to fish. An earlier hydro project at the falls enabled the nation's first long distance transmission of electricity, in June 1889, sending power from the falls to downtown Portland, 14 miles away. A historical marker in downtown's Lownsdale Square marks the event.

A page at the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation provides a look inside the Sullivan Plant, which has a set of rather steampunk-looking vintage turbines.

Paper

The most prominent, and smelliest, part of the development around the falls is the paper industry. The falls were home to the Blue Heron paper mill on the Oregon City side, and the West Linn Paper Company on the West Linn side of the river, but the Blue Heron mill closed abruptly in 2011. The mill specialized in paper recycling, and apparently it's now more profitable to ship waste paper to China than it is to recycle it here. Which is yet another reminder that international trade is often bizarre and nonsensical. There are a few photos of the now-demolished powerhouse for the Blue Heron mill here

Future

In 2011, both the locks and one of the two paper mills at the falls closed, and both closures seem to be fairly permanent. The other mill seems to be prospering, as far as I know, and the hydro plant is licensed to operate thru the year 2034, but the closures still raise a question of what (if anything) to do with the falls going forward.

Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation and the Willamette Falls Heritage Area Coalition are interested in the historic preservation aspects of the falls, the latter group wanting to involve the National Park Service in the effort. The city government is apparently interested in shifting gears and becoming a creative class hub, and Metro's expressed interest in buying the old Blue Heron site, which would likely mean at least part of the site becoming a park at some point in the distant future, and probably repurposing at least some of the historic mill buildings, similar to what's under discussion for the remote Bull Run Powerhouse. Speaking strictly as someone who likes taking photos of waterfalls, that sounds like a great idea. With one important caveat, namely that I'm not interested in throwing anyone out of work just so I can get better waterfall photos.

Lafayette Locks • Yamhill Falls

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Today's adventure takes us out to rural Yamhill County, to Lafayette Locks County Park, on the Yamhill River near the town of Lafayette. It's hard to believe today, but back in the early 20th century the little Yamhill River had a bit of commercial steamboat traffic on it, shipping Yamhill Valley crops to market. Shipping was impeded by some rapids (known somewhat generously as "Yamhill Falls") at this point in the river, so local boosters convinced the US Army Corps of Engineers to build and operate a modest lock system, the remains of which you see here.

The old locks were on the far side of the river and aren't accessible from the park, and the riverbank's thick with trees these days, so you really don't get a good look at things like you do at Cascade Locks. Nor is there good access to the river unless you're up for a muddy scramble down a steep bank. Still, the park has a large and well-maintained picnic area, and it's a pleasant place to stop even if the park's signature attraction is across the river and behind some trees.

The locks are a little-known historical footnote, and usually it's hard to find a lot of information online about something this obscure. But back in 1990 the Oregon Historical Quarterly published a long two-part article about the locks: "From Dream to Demolition: The Yamhill Lock & Dam", by Suann Murray Reddick, in Vol. 91, Nos. 1 and 2, which as far as I can tell remains the definitive work on the Lafayette Locks. The previous link goes to a JSTOR preview of Part 1; if you have a Multnomah County library card, and you want to read the full text of both parts of the article, you can get PDFs at 2 permalinks: Part 1, Part 2. The locks are also mentioned briefly in an earlier article, "Tributaries of the Willamette: Yamhill, Santiam, Calapooya" ( Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1943)), by Ruth Rydell, giving a perspective on them while they were still in operation.

The two parts of the Reddick article come to about 90 pages. I've read the whole thing, along with the relevant parts of the Rydell piece, and I'll try to summarize the tale briefly. But if that's still TL;DR for you, I'll pass along a couple of other links first: Here are three historical photos, a YouTube video about rafting the rapids here, and a short blog post with a few photos. Also, the City of Dayton, downstream of the locks (and home to the Ferry St. Bridge), has a short article on their website about Yamhill river shipping. Dayton was effectively the head of navigation on the river until the locks came, and the article indicates river traffic had dried up there by the 1920s.

Now back to our story. Part 1 of the Reddick article details the decades-long struggle to get the locks built. Yamhill Falls was one of the few places the Yamhill River could be forded, so an Indian trail passed through here prior to European settlement. Settlers saw the value of the area early on, and the falls were homesteaded in 1840, well before any sort of local government had been instituted. By the 1850s, the Yamhill Valley had become a prime agricultural area, and initially the only way to get products to market was by boat (the same state of affairs encountered at Butteville, Cornelius, and elsewhere.)

The falls, puny as they were, still presented an obstacle to river traffic, and the first proposal to build locks on the river came in January 1859, a month before Oregon statehood. This privately financed proposal went nowhere, as did further attempts continuing into the 1870s. At that point railroads had come to the Yamhill Valley, but exorbitant freight charges led local boosters (but never quite enough investors) to see an opening for a cheaper river-based alternative. After the last private proposal fell through in 1876, attention turned to convincing Congress to fund the locks instead. This took another twenty years of lobbying, with a reluctant Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly surveying the area and coming up with different (but never very positive) recommendations every few years. Finally, in 1896, the political pressure succeeded, and Congress appropriated up to $200,000 toward the locks proposal.

Part 2 picks up with the construction of the locks. Construction turned out to be more difficult than expected, due to problems with flooding and weak, eroding river banks. The locks finally opened on September 22nd, 1900 -- rather than the original target of December 31st, 1898 -- and construction ran to over $72,000, about 20% over budget. The article points out that the locks were essentially obsolete the day they opened; the first proposal had come in 1859, when much of the area was still howling wilderness, but four decades later the Yamhill Valley had electricity, telephones, multiple railroad lines, and a few paved roads, and riverboat traffic was declining even on the Willamette and Columbia.

Within a year, the cheaply built locks proved inadequate to the task, and sustained serious damage due to the same flooding and erosion issues it had encountered during construction, as well as collisions with drifting riverboats and errant logs from log rafts. The Corps of Engineers invested an additional $22,000 in repairs just in the first year. A 1903 study gave a couple of options for strengthening and upgrading the lock and dam, but suggested they weren't worth investing in as the locks saw very little traffic. The lack of traffic was something of a chicken-and-egg problem; the locks were inoperable during high river levels, and shipping companies were unwilling to risk having their boats stranded on the upstream side of the locks in that situation. This absence of traffic in turn made the Corps not want to bother fixing the dam's high water problems.

So by 1903 traffic through the locks had essentially petered out already, only three years in, and the Corps of Engineers floated a serious proposal to abandon the locks altogether. Naturally there was a local public outcry, and suspicions that the railroads were in on the proposal. The matter was forwarded on to distant Washington DC, where it ran into bureaucratic inertia: The locks were neither abandoned nor upgraded, but simply maintained in their current state and repaired every so often.

Various schemes for shipping people and cargo on the Yamhill River came and went, and none lasted long. By 1912, the article notes, just 386.6 tons of freight and 327 passengers used the locks in the course of the entire year. This minimal level of traffic continued into the 1920s, and the Corps classified the locks as "proper for abandonment". Rydell quotes an Oregonian writer to the effect that, during this time, there was so little river traffic the locks were opened every ten days "just to shake the rust out and to show that all is well."

Traffic picked up in the late 1920s thanks almost entirely to log rafts, and local farmers became increasingly interested in the reservoir behind the dam as a source of irrigation water. Another study was commissioned in 1931 on options for upgrading the dam, but again nothing came of it. Log traffic increased through the 1930s and peaked in 1943, when 101,981 tons of logs passed through the locks. Rydell mentions that in 1942 (the previous year) an average of two log rafts per day had passed through the locks. At that point there was every reason to assume this level of traffic was the new permanent state of affairs.

The log raft trade declined quickly after World War II, however, as the Yamhill Valley started running out of trees, and modern log trucks took much of the remaining business. By 1953 the locks were back on the chopping block, thanks to the loss of traffic and Congressional budget cuts. As in 1903, there was a public outcry, in part about the locks themselves, and in part about the adjacent park, which had been developed by the first lock keeper back when the locks opened. This time, local protests proved futile, and the locks and dam were officially abandoned on February 4th, 1954. The newly formed county parks department took over the locks and the park roughly a year later.

Back in 1908, the state's Deputy Fish Warden had already raised alarms about the dam as a barrier to migrating salmon, and he somehow convinced the feds to install a primitive fish ladder at the dam. The article doesn't mention any further concerns about fish until after the abandonment of the dam, at which point the Oregon Fish Commission stepped in and raised new concerns about the dam and salmon. The dam was still used for irrigation water at that point, and a farmers-vs.-fish battle ensued that should seem all too familiar to anyone who witnessed Southern Oregon's Klamath River water wars just a few years ago. And similar to the Klamath situation, the state sided with the fish. Or more precisely, it sided with sport fishermen who thought the river looked promising. By 1960, the Oregon Fish Commission was insisting that the county had to provide adequate fish passage, or the dam would have to be removed. Meanwhile, the abandoned and unmaintained locks and dam continued to deteriorate, and the county had no funds on hand to repair them. They county sided with farmers and dragged its feet cooperating with the state, and several years of legal wrangling ensued. Then, in 1963, a subtle and little-noticed change to state law removed the county's power to block state action on the dam, and on September 18, 1963 the state dynamited the dam, to the great surprise and dismay of the local community. A 1976 proposal to build a shiny new dam for irrigation went nowhere, and contemporary (circa 1990) discussion around building a new dam or at least creating a fish pond at the old locks seems to have come to nought as well.

The article goes on to point out that, from a sport fishing perspective, the promised benefits to fish may have been somewhat oversold, and (as of 1990) neither coho nor chinook salmon populations had become established in the river. It isn't indicated whether there had ever been coho or chinook in the river before the dam went in, which is the key point ecologically speaking. It's quite possible nobody knows.

Another thing the article barely mentions, but which I'm intrigued by, is the fact that the old Yamhill Falls site was a major river crossing prior to European settlement, so presumably local tribes had been using this spot for thousands of years before pioneers arrived with their money-making schemes. So the area is at least potentially an archeological site, albeit a heavily disturbed one. I wonder if anyone's ever taken a professional look at it?

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. I don't usually do blog posts quite this long anymore, but I basically go wherever the source material takes me. As I mentioned earlier, the park isn't terribly exciting these days even if you're a history nerd like me. But it does preserve an unusual bit of local history, and it's certainly a change of pace from other better-known Yamhill Valley attractions: The aviation museum, the big Indian casino out west of McMinnville, pretentious wineries and art galleries everywhere, and that sort of thing. So if you go, take a picnic lunch along, slow down, and just watch and listen to the river for a while. It's quite nice, really.

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.

Steamboat Park, Cornelius

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A few photos of Steamboat Park, on a bend of the Tualatin River out in Cornelius. The name refers to a brief era when commercial steamboats plied the river, shipping grain and produce downstream to market. Feel free to be amazed and doubtful about that; the Tualatin isn't very wide or deep, it meanders all over the place, and it's always full of logs and other obstructions. The Tualatin Riverkeeper guide to the river doesn't recommend boating upstream of Hillsboro, even in a canoe or kayak. So the Tualatin River's steamboats can't have been very big. A pdf about the city's points of interest describes those days:

So even though the Tualatin was narrow, shallow and overhung with tree limbs, it was the best way farmers could get their wheat, and later their fruit and timber to market. In 1867, the Oregonian noted that piloting a steamship down the river was not an easy task: “In summer, the size and great number of mosquitoes sometimes obscure the vision of the captain or attack him so furiously as to compel him to let go of the wheel…. collisions with the bank are not infrequent.”

The steamboat era ended when the railroad came to town.

In fact, the city of Cornelius is named after the guy who convinced the railroad to come to town, if that gives you any idea. It's a shame, really. It's fun to imagine that the Tualatin once had a vanished era of glamorous Mississippi-style paddlewheel steamers, full of riverboat gamblers and fancy ladies and mysterious strangers and intrigue galore, with Cornelius's answer to Mark Twain writing it all down for posterity.

The park doesn't currently have a lot that harks back to the steamboat era. The city's discussed putting up interpretive signs, but they aren't the region's most affluent city and they don't have a big budget to work with, so it hasn't happened yet. They received a Metro grant some years ago to do habitat restoration along the river, and this July they discussed getting a federal grant to put in a boat launch for non-motorized boats (as there's no river access in the park at all right now), which would put the interpretive sign plan on hold again. Until, I imagine, grant money becomes available, or someone volunteers.