Troutdale

Troutdale grew at the mouth of the Sandy as a river and railroad town, named for the fish ponds its founder, Captain John Harlow, kept here. In April 1894, 446 unemployed men of Portland's contingent of Coxey's Army, bound for Washington to demand public works jobs, walked out along the Union Pacific tracks, and the town fed and housed them. The board says they commandeered a train east. Accounts differ on how they came by it; one has the U.S. marshal sending cars out and then wiring that a train had been seized. Cavalry stopped it at Arlington.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Troutdale This pioneer community, gateway to the Columbia Gorge was settled in the 1850's. Cattle herds of early pioneers were driven to the nearby Sandy River from The Dalles while the emigrants rafted their wagons down the Columbia. First known as Sandy, the present name came from fish ponds built by the town's founder, Captain John Harlow. By the turn of the century railroad and river commerce made Troutdale a noisy boom town boasting "A tavern on each corner and one in the middle." Here in 1894 part of Coxey's Army, 500 unemployed demonstrators, commandeered a train in an attempt to reach Washington D.C.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vista House at Crown Point — 6.8 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.
• Multnomah Falls — 13 mi
  A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.
• Vanport — 16 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.
• McLoughlin House — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Sandy River Bridge — 0.5 mi
• River Highway — 5.3 mi
• Vanport — 15 mi
• Oregon City — 17 mi