Talk:Cottage Grove, Oregon
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[edit] Copyvio text removed from article
The city of Cottage Grove incorporated in February 1887, more than thirty years after the first settlers arrived at what is now Dorena Reservoir. The small town developed as the center of a struggling agricultural community, a place where people often settled because better lands in the northern valley had been taken. Most newcomers hailed from the Midwest. While they found winters in the valley mild, settlers had to acclimate to months of rainy weather and annual floods. Settlers supplemented subsistence agriculture with livestock and dairies but more importantly with logging and mining. Some of the earliest logging activity in Lane County occurred on the Upper Coast Fork Willamette River (now the location of Cottage Grove Dam) where settler William Payne built the area's first mill in 1867. By the 1890s, loggers used this Willamette River tributary to transport logs to the new mills that lined the shores. Further north, along the Row River, mining became a significant economic activity after gold was discovered in the Cascade Range in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1902, 2,000 mining claims existed in the Cascades near Cottage Grove. The Row River Valley provided the easiest access to the Bohemia mining area and eventually became the site for the area's first railroad, built in 1899. The railroad ended Cottage Grove's isolation and incorporated the city into western Oregon's transportation corridor. It also launched a logging boom that would not subside until the 1980s.
From http://www.ccrh.org/comm/cottage/settlers2.htm. Great info, needs a substantial rewrite. Katr67 (talk) 05:34, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
