Corvallis

Where the Marys Meets the Willamette

Corvallis stands on the west bank of the Willamette River just below the mouth of Marys River, and Oregon State University dominates the town.^1,2 The 2020 count put its population above 59,922.² The site was the longtime home of the Mary’s River band of the Kalapuya, and malaria killed about 90 percent of the Kalapuya between 1830 and 1833, before the first white settlers came in the early 1840s.²

Avery’s Little Fields

In 1940 the Federal Writers’ Project guide said James L. Mulkey, Johnson Mulkey, and William F. Dixon arrived in 1845 and Joseph C. Avery in 1846, while the city and the Oregon Encyclopedia date Avery’s 640-acre claim to 1845.^1,2,4 Avery ran a free canoe ferry to draw settlers, and in the winter of 1847-1848 he chained off 12 acres around his cabin for town lots, a tract called Little Fields.^1,4 Dixon worked as a cabinet maker, and in 1848 he started a ferry across the Willamette River.^3,5 In 1849 Avery came back from the California gold fields and opened a store, and Wayman St. Clair and Eldridge Hartless opened another general store facing the river near Jackson Avenue that same year.^1,3 Avery filed a plat for Marysville on February 25, 1851, using part of his 1845 claim, and Dixon soon platted an adjoining part of his own land.³ That February the town became seat of the newly created Benton County, and it was incorporated in 1857.^1,2 In 1853 Avery renamed Marysville to avoid confusion with Marysville, California, and the city credits him with coining Corvallis from Latin words for ‘heart of the valley’.⁴

Steamboats and a Brief Capital

In October 1851 the sidewheeler Canemah became the first steamboat to reach Corvallis, and the town became a place where Portland freight was moved onto pack trains bound for the mines of southern Oregon and California.⁶ By 1852 boats were carrying local grain and produce to Portland, and the Canemah charged 20 cents a bushel to haul wheat from the Corvallis warehouses of Avery and Company.⁶ In January 1855 the legislature voted to move the territorial seat to Corvallis, and the Canemah brought the legislators’ baggage upriver to a great demonstration.¹ Asahel Bush brought his presses from Salem and printed the Oregon Statesman here until June, when the capital went back to Salem and he took the paper with him.¹ In 1860 a man at Corvallis built the Hay Burner, a scow driven by cattle on a treadmill; on its first trip downstream it walked ashore at McGooglin’s Slough, and it never had the power to come back against the current.⁶ The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began clearing the channel in 1871, and after the canal and locks at Willamette Falls opened in 1873, boats from Portland no longer had to unload around the falls.⁶

Rails, a Bank, and the College Farm

The 1940 guide dates the railroad’s arrival to 1878; the Oregon Encyclopedia dates it to 1880, when Henry Villard finished a line from Portland on the west side of the river.^1,2 T. Egerton Hogg’s Oregon Pacific Railroad opened to traffic in 1884, but the entrance to Yaquina Bay proved overly shallow, and in 1890 the line defaulted on its bonds and went into receivership.⁷ W.B. Hamilton and Zephin Job opened the town’s first bank in 1886, and it failed in 1893, brought down by the national panic and its heavy stake in the Oregon Pacific.⁸ A horsecar named Daisy began running on June 19, 1890; crews took up the rails on February 10, 1900, and the Sunday Oregonian called the line a “dilapidated reminder of boom times.”⁹ The 1940 guide traces Corvallis College, founded in 1858, to a school started in 1852, while the Oregon Encyclopedia’s account of the university begins with Corvallis Academy in 1856.^1,10 Proslavery immigrants from Southern and Border States had founded the school, and on October 27, 1868, after a push by faculty member William Moreland and state senator C.B. Bellinger, the legislature made it Oregon’s land-grant institution.^2,10 The state took full control in 1885, and in 1889 the college moved out of downtown into a new three-story brick building just west of it.^10,11 Between 1890 and 1908 Coote planted trees around the Administration Building, now Benton Hall, and lined the Lower Campus paths with American elms, and many of those trees still stand.¹¹

The Van Buren Bridge, Camp Adair, and the Mills

The Benton County State Bank marker counts 1,817 people in 1900 and 4,552 in 1910, while the Oregon Encyclopedia gives 1,819 in one passage and 1,527 in another for 1900.^2,8 Voters made Corvallis a dry town in 1905, and it stayed dry until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.² After 65 years the ferry stopped when the Van Buren Street Bridge opened on March 11, 1913, and the historic district documentation calls that bridge the oldest swing span bridge in Oregon.^5,12 After the attack on Pearl Harbor, troops trained on campus, and the army’s Camp Adair north of town brought business to the city.² The postwar housing boom raised Oregon’s lumber production in the mid-1950s, making hundreds of jobs in the woods and mills west of town, and the population more than doubled between 1950 and 1970, to 35,056.² Hewlett-Packard opened a large plant northeast of town in 1976; it employed some six thousand workers in the mid-1990s and has since cut to about two thousand.² Trains stopped running on First Street in the 1970s, and the last rails came out in 2002, when workers found them under the old pavement.³