[or-roots] Wheatland, Oregon

[Nancy Lee Adams]

More Wheatland Ferry History,

Oregon Hikes - Willamette Mission Park
Follow this promenade a mile to the Wheatland Ferry landing. ... Walk along the road to return to your car, turning left at the first stop sign and ... A trailside monument describes the mission built on the old riverbank by Methodist ...
web.oregon.com > Recreation > Hiking - Cached - Similar
History: The Wheatland Ferry has the oldest ferry landing in Oregon, dating to 1844 when mules winched a log barge across the river with ropes.

Nancy


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Chris & Bill Strickland 
  To: or-roots mail list 
  Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 11:05 AM
  Subject: [or-roots] Wheatland, Oregon


  >From a perhaps less biased source than our two current responders, is this website, citing a book titled "Willamette Landings - Ghost Towns for the River", by Howard McKinlay Corning as a source:
     http://www.wheatlandferry.com/oregon/atchison.html


    "A public sale of the lots in the town of Atchison, in Yamhill County, on the west bank of the Willamette river, at Matheny's Ferry, will take place on the 15th of May next (1847) on the premises. Wheat will be taken in payment. Further particulars as to terms &c, will be made known the day of sale." -Daniel Matheny
  This notice first appeared in the advertising columns of the Spectator, April 29, 1847, but Atchison is not to be found on any map of Oregon, past or present. Lying at a point about twelve miles below Salem, Atchison made a quick growth to regional importance. Its local residents however, thought Atchison City an unlikely name for a wheat-shipping center and took to calling the place Wheatland. Wheatland, although still a name on the Oregon map, is gone-its site covered by a peach orchard that spreads along the bench-land. Only the ferry landing and the road to it remain. 

  Like many other early Oregon towns, Wheatland was the ambitious undertaking of a single individual. Its founder, Daniel Matheny, was born in Virginia, December 11, 1793. Following adventurous years in the War of 1812, in the Black Hawk War of Illinois, and in a minor fracus of 1839 referred to as the Mormon War, in which he moved from a lieutanancy to a captaincy, Matheny learned of the free land to the west in the Oregon Country. It was in the spring of 1843 that he and his brother Henry allied themelves with the overland wagon train that became known as the "Great Migration." In the journey westward Matheney's sound judgement was often depended upon.

  Evidently Matheny brought some money with him to Oregon; for in the spring of 1844 he purchased the squatter rights to the donation land claim of James O'Neal, situated on the west bank of the Willamete River at a point about seventeen miles above Champoeg. That was just across the river and slightly north of the first Methodist Mission, then recently abandoned in favor of Salem. Of greater advantage was the fact that the O'Neal claim also lay just southwest of French Prairie, a district of growing settlement.


  continued at the listed URL,


  Bill Strickland






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