Aurora

The board ends the colony at Keil's death in 1877, but the ending took five more years. Keil had bought the colony's land in his own name, so when he died that December its farms, mills and houses had to be divided like an estate, probated by a judge as a will, with Bethel's Missouri lands settled the same way. The final distribution came on January 22, 1883. The town's name carried a grief of its own: Keil named it for his daughter Aurora, one of four of his children who died in the smallpox epidemic of 1862.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Aurora Dr. Wilhelm Keil founded here a Christian co-operative colony patterned after his colony at Bethel, Missouri. Musicians of the settlement made it widely famous. After Dr. Keil's death in 1877 the communal enterprise was dissolved.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Champoeg — 6.7 mi
  The river-bend meadow where settlers voted for a government in 1843, and where the Willamette took the entire town but one warehouse eighteen years later.
• Willamette Falls — 10 mi
  A horseshoe of basalt across the Willamette, ringed by a century of mills, that is still one of the last places in the Columbia basin where tribes gather lamprey by hand.
• McLoughlin House — 11 mi
  The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.
• Silver Falls State Park — 25 mi
  Ten waterfalls in a logged-over canyon whose owner once charged a dime admission and pushed junk cars off the edge for the crowd, until a photographer got it made a park.

More markers nearby

• Boone's Ferry — 2.9 mi
• Boone's Landing — 4.5 mi
• Champoeg — 7.4 mi
• Mulino Flour Mill — 8.5 mi