Mulino Flour Mill

Molala and Kalapuya people lived along Milk Creek before Richard and Cynthia Howard came from Ohio and claimed its oxbow in the mid-1840s. Howard had been a miller, and by 1851 the creek turned his gristmill, which still stands across the highway, its hand-hewn frame largely intact. Flour milling stopped in 1924; the family ground feed until 1958. The town's name came from the post office. Charles Howard asked for Howards Mill, refused as too long, and Molino, Spanish for mill, refused as too like Molalla. They settled on Mulino in 1882.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Willamette Falls — 9.0 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 — 9.2 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 — 15 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.
• Silver Falls State Park — 24 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

• Aurora — 8.5 mi
• Oregon City — 8.9 mi
• Oregon City Falls — 8.9 mi
• Willamette Falls — 9.0 mi