Boone's Ferry

This board stands at the French Prairie rest area, a few miles from the crossing it describes. The Boones ran a ferry over the Willamette from 1847, and the eldest son, Jesse, cleared the road north that still carries the family name. The panel says only that Jesse ran the ferry until his death in 1872. In March of that year he was shot dead near the landing by a neighbor, in a quarrel that began over sheep and turned on access to the river. The Boone Family Association dedicated a memorial to him in 1937.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Champoeg — 5.7 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 — 9.1 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 — 10 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.
• Vanport — 23 mi
  Briefly Oregon's second-largest city, built in about 110 days for Kaiser's shipyard workers, washed away in an afternoon in 1948, and later renamed out of existence.

More markers nearby

• Boone's Landing — 1.6 mi
• Aurora — 2.9 mi
• Champoeg — 6.4 mi
• Willamette Post — 8.2 mi