La Créole River with the Willamette. The Yamhill River was spanned at Lafayette with a strong double-track bridge placed on abutments of hewn timber, bolted and filled with earth, and raised fifty feet above low water.[1] This was the first structure of the kind in the country. The Rockville Canal and Transportation Company was incorporated in February 1853, for the purpose of constructing a basin or breakwater with a canal at and around the falls of the Willamette, which work was completed by December 1854, greatly increasing the comfort of travel by avoiding the portage.[2]
In 1851 the fruit trees set out in 1847 began to bear, so that a limited supply of fruit was furnished the home market;[3] and two years later a shipment was made out of the territory by Meek and Luelling, of Milwaukie, who sold four bushels of apples in San Francisco for five hundred dollars. The following year they sent forty bushels to the same market, which brought twenty-five hundred dollars. In 1861 the shipment of apples from Oregon amounted to over seventy-five thousand bushels;[4] but they no longer
- ↑ Or. Statesman, Sept. 23, 1851.
- ↑ Id., Feb. 26, 1853. Deady gives some account of this important work in his Hist. Or., MS., 28. A man named Page from California, representing capital in that state, procured the passage of the act of incorporation. The project was to build a basin on the west side of the river above the falls, with mills, and hoisting works to lift goods above the falls, and deposit them in the basin, instead of wagoning them a mile or more as had been done. They constructed the basin, and erected mills at its lower edge. The hoisting works were made with ropes, wheels, and cages, in which passsengers and goods were lifted up. Page was killed by the explosion of the Gazelle, owned by the company, after which the enterprise went to pieces through suits brought against the company by employés, and the property fell into the hands of Kelley, one of the lawyers, and Robert Pentland. In the winter of 1860–1, the mills and all were destroyed by fire, when works of a similar nature were commenced on the east side of the river, where they remained until the completion of the canal and locks on the west side, of a recent date.
- ↑ On McCarver's farm, one mile east of Oregon City, was an orchard of 15 acres containing 200 apple-trees, and large members of pears, plums, apricots, cherries, nectarines, and small fruits. It yielded this year 15 bushels of currants, and a full crop of the above-named fruits. Or. Statesman, July 29, 1851. In 1852, R. C. Geer advertised his nursery as containing 42 varieties of apples, 15 of pears, 5 of peaches, and 6 of cherries. Thomas Cox raised a Rhode Island greening 12½ inches in circumference, a good size for a young tree. Id., Dec. 18, 1852.
- ↑ Id., Sept. 22, 1862; Oregonian, July 15, 1862; Overland Monthly, i. 39.
