Dr. John McLoughlin

The board gives John McLoughlin's offices and leaves out the woman he lived with for forty-six years. Marguerite Wadin McKay, daughter of a Swiss fur trader and a Cree mother, was the widow of Alexander McKay when she and McLoughlin married in the country fashion around 1811. She came with him to Oregon City in 1846. He died in 1857 and she in 1860, and both were buried at St. John's Catholic church. They were dug up and reburied in 1948, and moved again in 1970 to lie beside their relocated house.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Dr. John McLoughlin 1784-1857 Chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver philanthropist, and founder of Oregon City. The land on the east bank of the Willamette River at the falls was claimed by Dr.McLoughlin and the Hudson's Bay Co. in 1828-29. First called Willamette Falls, the town was platted in 1842 and was named Oregon City by Dr. McLoughlin. Oregon City was the first incorporated U. S. city west of the Rocky Mountains-1844, Provisional and Territorial Capital-1843-52, and the continous seat of government for Clackamas County since 1843. Dr. McLoughlin became an American citizen and was elected mayor of Oregon City in 1851. His home was built in 1845 near the falls and was moved to the top of the bluff in 1909. The McLoughlin House National Historic Site is open to the public. Dr. McLoughlin is remembered as "The Father of the Oregon Country" because of the aid he provided to the missionaries and pioneers who came over the Oregon Trail.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Willamette Falls — steps away
  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 — 1.1 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.
• Champoeg — 14 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.
• Vanport — 17 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

• George Abernethy — steps away
• Willamette Falls — steps away
• Willamette Falls Locks — steps away
• Oregon City — 0.6 mi