Roseburg

Aaron Rose’s Claim on Deer Creek

Roseburg, seat of Douglas County, is built along a gentle curve of the Umpqua River where Deer Creek comes in, among steep green hills.³ The Oregon Encyclopedia gives it about 24,000 people in 2020 and calls it the largest city in the county, and by 2021 healthcare was its largest employment sector.¹

The Upper Umpqua and Cow Creek peoples lived in the area for millennia before white settlers came.¹ A squatter named Musgrove is reported to have been the first white settler on the townsite, and the brothers J.T. and L.C. Raimey, who acquired his rights, conveyed them to Aaron Rose, a newly arrived settler, in the fall of 1851.⁴ The Oregon Encyclopedia dates Rose’s homestead along Deer Creek to September 23, 1851, and his family’s home became a tavern and stopping place for travelers on the old Oregon-California Trail.^1,4 An election in 1854 moved the Douglas County seat from Winchester to Roseburg, and Rose donated three acres and $1,000 for a courthouse.^1,4 The settlement, first called Deer Creek, took the name Roseburgh for Rose in 1857 by the Oregon Encyclopedia’s account, while the county chronology dates the change to 1855.^1,5

Roundhouse and Division Point

The city was incorporated in October 1870, the year the sternwheeler Swan came up the Umpqua as far as Roseburg, on what the city’s history calls the only steamboat voyage on that stretch of river.^4,5 In 1872 a woodburning locomotive brought the first Oregon and California Railroad train into Roseburg from Portland, and the town stayed the end of the line until 1884, when the extension to Ashland was completed.^2,4 In 1887 the line over the Siskiyous was finished, and the railroad set up shops and a roundhouse in Roseburg.⁴ In 1894, the year the town dropped the “h” from its name, Roseburg acquired the Oregon State Soldiers Home; the Oregon Encyclopedia says the Roseburg Veterans Administration Hospital replaced it in 1933, while the county chronology has the hospital starting in 1932.^1,5

The railroad kept its division point for the main line between Oakland, California, and Portland at Roseburg from 1900 to 1927.² On September 7, 1905, the Roseburg Plaindealer counted 450 railroad men in town, thirteen percent of its 3500 residents, along with 40 train crews and 36 engines.² Aaron Rose began developing the Mill-Pine neighborhood beside the railroad property, and it takes in a large section of Rose’s Southern Addition; the first through fourth southern additions were platted between 1887 and 1894, and a large proportion of the neighborhood’s residents worked for the railroad in jobs ranging from wiper to engineer.^2,6 The 1988 marker says the division point moved north in 1927, the county chronology says it moved to Eugene in 1928, and railroad employment in Roseburg dwindled.^5,6 The Mill-Pine neighborhood was listed on the National Register in 1985, and the marker says it has remained largely unchanged since the division point moved in 1927.⁶

Prunes, Sawmills, and Roseburg Lumber

Farmers began with grain and cattle and moved on to hops, prunes, and other specialty crops, and the county chronology calls 1895 to 1930 the great prune era.^4,5 The state guide counted 4,362 people and found round houses, car shops, canning factories, and sawmills in a town that held an annual Rose Festival each May.³ Kenneth Ford started Roseburg Lumber Company in 1936 as a sawmill with salvaged equipment and twenty-five employees.⁷ The county had 37 sawmills in 1939 and 278 by 1947, most of them cutting Douglas fir, and the harvest earned Roseburg the title “Timber Capitol of the Nation.”⁴ The timber industry slid after the 1980s recession and the federal logging restrictions of the 1990s, and a 2009 Oregon Business report put Douglas County unemployment at 16 percent.¹

The Blast of August 7, 1959

On the night of August 6, 1959, George Rutherford of Chehalis, Washington, parked a Pacific Powder Company truck carrying 2 tons of dynamite and 4.5 tons of nitro carbo nitrate in front of the Garretsen Building Supply Company, near Oak and Pine Streets, and went to bed at the Umpqua Hotel.⁸ Around midnight the building caught fire, and at 1:14 in the morning, with Rutherford running toward it from a half-block away, the truck’s load exploded.⁹ The explosion left a crater twenty feet deep and over fifty feet across, leveled eight blocks of the commercial core, and broke windows up to seven miles away.⁹ Fourteen people died; the Oregon Encyclopedia counts over 120 injured, the Oregon Historical Society 125, and the marker at the site fifty-seven.^8,9,10 The architect Richard Neutra agreed to draw a master plan for the eight leveled blocks, but the city failed to qualify for federal urban renewal funds, and land near the site went instead to a new bridge across the South Umpqua into downtown.⁸ All that remained of the Coca-Cola bottling plant near the center of the explosion was a fused mound of glass bottles.¹¹