George Abernethy

George Abernethy came out in 1840 as steward of the Methodist mission's business, bought its store when the mission closed, and moved the stock to Oregon City. There was almost no coin in the country, so he made his own small change: flakes of flint from an old Native tool-making ground near his house, wrapped in paper strips on which he inked his name, the year and the amount. Other merchants had to honor them. He was the provisional government's only governor, elected in 1845 and 1847, and the December 1861 flood took most of what he owned here.

What the plaque says

Oregon History George Abernethy From 1845 to 1849, George Abernethy was the first Provisional Governor of the Oregon Country, which extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from California to Northern British Columbia. After arriving in Oregon in 1840 as part of the Methodist Mission at Champoeg, he was involved in a series of meetings that ended in the celebrated May 2, 1843, vote to organize a Provisional Government under the United States rather than Great Britain. After Abernethy served two terms as Governor, the Provisional Government ceased to exist when Oregon became a Territory in 1849. Governor Abernethy's pioneer home was located on the east bank of the Willamette River near the Interstate 205 Bridge. The bridge across the Willamette one-half mile east from this location has been designated by the 1979 Oregon Legislature as the "George Abernethy Memorial Bridge" in fitting tribute to Oregon's first pioneer governor.

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

• Dr. John McLoughlin — steps away
• Willamette Falls — steps away
• Willamette Falls Locks — steps away
• Oregon City — 0.6 mi