Rural Life in Willamette Valley Oregon

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The Willamette Valley: home of rich soil, mild climate, and warm people.
The Willamette Valley: home of rich soil, mild climate, and warm people.
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The many rivers, ponds, and lakes in the Willamette offer fine boating and fishing.
The many rivers, ponds, and lakes in the Willamette offer fine boating and fishing.
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Map of Willamette Valley, Oregon.
Map of Willamette Valley, Oregon.
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Robert Wheeler (foreground) and other workers in a two-family Eugene urban garden founded in 1980 (kiwi fruit are growing on the arbor at the right).
Robert Wheeler (foreground) and other workers in a two-family Eugene urban garden founded in 1980 (kiwi fruit are growing on the arbor at the right).

Cream of the country: Willamette Valley, Oregon. The second in a series of the best sections of America to live a rural lifestyle.

Rural Life in Willamette Valley Oregon

Between 1840 and 1870, a half-million people traveled the arduous Oregon Trail. By horse, wagon, and on foot, they left Missouri (and civilization) behind and set out on a 2,000-mile, six-month journey across vast, treeless plains, countless treacherous rivers, forbidding desert, and steep mountain passes. At the Snake River, in what is now southeastern Idaho, the Oregon Trail branched. To the south lay the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada, and California. After the ’49 gold strike there, the fever to go west became epidemic.

Many of the Oregon-bound pioneers, however, preferred rich land to gold. The deep wagon tracks of those who turned north still mark sections of their route along the Snake, across the Blue Mountains, to the Columbia River. From there, a perilous boat trip or a treacherous route around Mt. Hood brought them to their final destination: Oregon’s 100-mile-long, 30-mile-wide Willamette Valley (pronounced Wil-LAMM-ette).

This amazing stretch of land, bordered on the east by the Coastal Range and on the west by the Cascades, was named the French Prairie after its first homesteaders, French-Canadian fur trappers, who were encouraged by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver to retire on the open meadows in the middle of the valley to help secure British claim to the territory.

  • Published on Nov 1, 1986
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