Thompson's Mills State Heritage Site

Four concrete silos, each 50 feet tall, rise above the farm fields of Linn County east of Shedd. A giant apple and a giant rose are painted on them. Below the silos the Calapooia River runs past Thompson’s Mills, a six-floor, 23,000-square-foot mill building on a 20-acre site that the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department keeps as a State Heritage Site. Beside the mill stand the 1904 Queen Anne house, a carriage house, a hay barn, a service bay, and a garage and shop.

On guided tours the interpreters let the water in. A water right that predates statehood sends the river rushing into the flume to the turbines, and the machinery starts its clanging and hammering. The mill runs empty and makes no product. On most tours it is shown running both ways, on water and on electric power. The main frame is hand-hewn timber, raised one story at a time with mortise and tenon joints and wooden pegs. The interior walls are unfinished studs with the backs of the siding showing, and they are painted white. “Reach over and put your hand on that beam,” Park Ranger Tom Parsons writes that guides tell visitors. “It was installed when Abraham Lincoln was president.” By Parsons’s count, Thompson’s Mills is one of three water-powered mills on the West Coast and the only one that is largely original. A case holds some of the mill’s old products, Thompson’s Best flour among them. Maps inside carry pins for visitors’ homes. By May 2014 they marked every state, Washington, D.C., and 41 foreign countries.

Photographers bring tripods inside, and painters set up easels on the grounds. The mill race in front of the building and the tail race and river behind it are open to fishing under state rules, and the race banks serve for practicing fly casting. Children, Parsons writes, see the apple and rose on the silos, “but then notice the poultry and get distracted.” The mill keeps flocks of chickens, turkeys and geese.

Parsons’s own reports run to smaller things. On the third floor the mill’s original north wall meets two later additions and forms a dark, formerly damp pocket that he calls “The Nook.” Over several summers he worked there with Park Ranger Assistants Matt Moritz and Thonni Morikawa. They scraped, primed and painted the old-growth siding, which was 99 percent intact, and hung gutters to stop the water splashing from the roofs above.

Cider days on the mill grounds

The geese eat well in the fall. The Thompson’s Mills Preservation Society held its first public apple pressing on a Sunday in early November 2017. Before then, the society’s Don Lyon told the Albany Democrat-Herald, an average Sunday might bring three or four tourists. That afternoon cars jammed the small parking lot. The society had bought a Correll cider press from a family in Veneta that builds them. Volunteers washed the apples in a mild bleach bath and rinsed them over a metal screen. Visitors then threw them into the grinder until the wooden bucket below was full, and Lyon slid the bucket under the press for others to turn the crank. The squashed apple bits went to the poultry. Lyon filtered the juice through a colander, and longtime volunteer Carl Browning pumped it into half-gallon jugs. “Liquid gold,” Lyon said as he poured. “It’s amazingly successful,” Browning said. “I’ve never seen the parking lot that full.”

The society scheduled three pressings for 2026: September 5, October 10 and October 24. The September day used about 1,200 pounds of apples, mostly Smitten, Initial and Honeycrisp. That was half again the usual single bin of 800 pounds, swelled by a surplus left over from an earlier event in Brownsville. Pressing starts at 11 a.m. and goes until the apples run out. The October newsletter puts that at about 2 p.m., the society’s website at about 3. Tastings are free, and jugs go for a $5 donation. Volunteers help the children turn the press while docents give tours of the mill.

Savage’s water and Finley’s mill

The water came before the mill. Americus Savage was living in Maine when he learned of the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act. He crossed the Missouri with his pregnant wife, Mary Ann, and five children, and the wagon stopped on the trail for the birth of a son, Columbus. Savage chose an L-shaped lot on the Calapooia and built a cabin. In the family’s account they “finally landed at [the] little cabin home, with a puncheon floor, a dirt fireplace, on the 25th day of December.” They grew wheat. In 1858 financial hardship forced the Savages to sell to Richard Finley “three and a half acres of land more or less and also the privilege of using all the water that may run or that they may cause to run through our land claim.” Finley also bought water rights from Robert Elder, who owned land on the far bank. The 1858 territorial right was for 35 cubic feet per second.

Finley had come to Oregon by wagon train in 1846 and had built two mills near Crawfordsville. His partners were Alexander Brandon, a carpenter, and Philemon Crawford, whom the 1979 National Register nomination names as the founder of Crawfordsville. The beams are said to have been hand hewn in Crawfordsville and floated down the Calapooia to the site. The partners placed the mill on the valley floor, near the farms that grew the grain. That location meant a five-mile water course was needed to get enough drop, with three dams, a millrace, headgates, a flume and turbines.

They called it Boston Mills, and nobody is sure why. In a 1939 Works Progress Administration interview, farmer John Cornett said the name followed a dispute that ended in a fistfight on top of a butte, a fight known afterward as “the battle of Bunker Hill.” The WPA interviewer added: “Whether Boston was named because it was near Bunker Hill, or Bunker Hill because it was near Boston, this field worker has been unable to definitely learn from any source.” Oregon Geographic Names guessed that a proprietor came from Massachusetts. Historian Kristine Deacon calls that unlikely, since Finley came from Tennessee and Brandon and Crawford from Indiana.

The mill sold flour to neighboring farmers and to miners headed for the California gold fields. Deacon writes that Crawford ran it south on pack trains and cleared a thousand dollars a trip. On the evening of October 25, 1862, by Deacon’s date, Boston Mills burned to the ground. One account puts the start of the fire in a separate wool-carding building, another puts the carding machine inside the mill. A University of Oregon archaeology team later found no sign of a separate carding building. The present 45-by-60-foot core went up in 1863 with two Perfection water turbines.

The town the railroad passed

The partners laid out the town of Boston about 75 feet west of the mill. The Oregon Encyclopedia and the preservation society date the plat to 1861, the National Register nomination to 1862. In 1866 miller William Simmons bought out Brandon and Crawford, and Internal Revenue tax stamps from the Civil War are still affixed to the handwritten contract. By 1869 Boston had a post office with Simmons as postmaster, two general stores and a blacksmith. The society counts about eighty people in the vicinity. Deacon describes about twenty families, a stagecoach stop, a school and a brick factory.

Then Ben Holladay built the Oregon and California Railroad up the valley. Deacon writes that citizens of Albany and Eugene paid to bring the line through their towns, and Boston could not or would not pay. In August 1871 Chinese laborers laid track a mile and a half to the west. Boston’s residents moved to the new Shedd’s Station and took their houses with them, and the Shedd’s Station post office opened on August 28. Only the mill was left. It survived by hauling its flour to a warehouse beside the tracks. The panic of 1873 cut into its trade, and ownership changed hands several times.

In 1891 Volquart (Martin) and Sophia Thompson, German immigrants, arrived with their children. The Oregon Encyclopedia counts six children and Deacon seven. Martin had worked at mills in Champoeg and Turner. The sources disagree about one piece of paper from that year. Finn J.D. John writes that staff at the mill point out the 1891 deed by which the Oregon Land Co. sold the mill. One of its witnesses was a 17-year-old office boy who signed “Bert Hoover,” and since he was a minor, John writes, the deed’s legality “is a bit questionable.” Deacon describes the deed as Thompson’s purchase of a lot in Salem. In her account it was signed by company president H.J. Minthorn and witnessed by his nephew and clerk, the future president.

Thompson bought a half interest in 1891 and became full owner in 1897. He replaced the French buhr stone with steel roller mills, renamed the place Boston Roller Mills, and printed the name on his flour sacks. An 1899 advertisement in The Brownsville Times announced “’pride of oregon’ flour, ‘white corn meal,’ Bran, Shorts, Chop. Graham flour a specialty.” Days after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake he gave ten barrels of flour to the relief effort. In 1904 he built the Queen Anne house on a dry-laid foundation of stone quarried in the Cascades. It has a square tower over the entry porch and hand-turned porch posts. The house served as both the family home and a rooming house for mill hands, and a 1910 addition took it from four bedrooms to eight. Under its wallpaper the shiplap walls were lined with flour sacks, which park staff found when they stripped the paper.

Silos, a war, and feed

Martin Thompson died in 1910. The Oregon Encyclopedia says Sophia and their sons Otto, called Ott, and Leo inherited the mill and named it Thompson’s Flouring Mills. Deacon says Ott and Leo got it and called it Thompson Bros. & Co. The society’s timeline has Ott adopting the Thompson’s Flouring Mills name in 1918. The flour went out as Valley Rose, Thompson’s Best and Cream of the Valley.

In the spring of 1917 Ott hired the Burrell Construction Company to build the four silos, with six-inch walls and room for 40,000 bushels. Merle Thompson said they were the first concrete silos in the central Willamette Valley. They let the mill store hard winter wheat from eastern Oregon and run all twelve months. That same year the United States entered World War I, and Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration bought flour for relief in Europe. “The place was running 24 hours a day,” John writes. The ledgers show it was the mill’s most profitable period.

The mill ran on water alone until 1941. The sources date the end of flour differently. The Oregon Encyclopedia says the mill had turned to animal feed by 1940. The society’s timeline says wheat flour stopped in 1946, when a fully water-powered pellet mill was bought. The 1979 nomination says flour milling ended in 1955. Interstate 5 went through less than a mile east in 1959. After Ott died in 1965 his son Myrle ran the business as Thompson’s Mills Inc. In 1974 the family sold to Merlene and Jim Danaher, after about eight decades.

On June 22, 1979, a section of concrete flume wall gave way. The nomination says the wall had little iron reinforcement and stood on improper footings, and the society’s timeline blames water mismanagement. About a quarter of the mill’s floor space fell into the water and production dropped by about half. The mill went onto the National Register on August 21 of that year, and repairs were made the same year.

From power sales to a state park

In 1986 the owners, by then David and Merlene Babits, put a generator online and began selling the mill’s waterpower to Pacific Power and Light. The 20-year agreement made up for failing feed sales. Floods in 1996 damaged the gates and the 1916 Leffel turbine, which was replaced with a Thomas Bros. turbine. In those years the science-fiction film Timescape, starring Jeff Daniels, was filmed at the mill.

In the fall of 1993 Bill and Ellen Lilja called a meeting titled “Beyond the Ruts” on saving Linn County’s old buildings. Some who came stayed afterward to talk about the mill, whose owners could not afford its repairs and wanted to sell. Among them were Martin Thompson, a family descendant, and Glenn Harrison of the county historical society. They incorporated the Boston Mill Society on June 6, 1994. County Commissioner Richard Stach found grant money for a feasibility study on heritage tourism. Peter Jensen attended the meetings for the farmers along the river, and the group followed the governor’s efforts on what Harrison calls the “fish problem” in the Calapooia.

In May 2004 the state bought the property for $856,547, plus $15,000 for artifacts and equipment. The mill opened as a park after three years of safety and structural work. In 2005 the power agreement ended, the old Thompson warehouse in Shedd was torn down, and the state sold 12 of the 1858 water right’s cubic feet per second to help the river. Sodom Dam and Shearer Dam have since been removed. In 2013 an adjustable dam was installed, which lets fish pass and the river drain after winter rains while keeping the mill race full enough to demonstrate milling year round.