Oregon City Falls

At ten at night on June 3, 1889, a switch was thrown in a powerhouse at the falls and current ran fourteen miles down a wire to light fifty-five arc lamps in Portland. That is the board's long-distance transmission. It ran on direct current and lost about a quarter of its voltage on the way. Within a year the Willamette Falls Electric Company had Westinghouse build alternating-current generators, and in 1890 the line carried long-distance commercial alternating current for the first time in the country. In 1892 the company merged into Portland General Electric.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Oregon City- once known as Willamette Falls- was early the site of an Indian salmon fishing village. The falls furnished the power for a lumber mill which began operation in 1842. A flour mill in 1844. A woolen mill in 1864 and the first paper mill in the Pacific Northwest in 1867 The first long distance commercial electric power transmission in the United States was from Oregon City to Portland in 1889.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McLoughlin House — 0.6 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.
• Willamette Falls — 0.6 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.
• 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.
• 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

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