Willamette Falls Locks

The board says the locks are still in use. They have not been since November 17, 2011, when the Corps of Engineers closed them over safety concerns. They were built from 1870 to 1872 to break a monopoly, the People's Transportation Company's control of every portage of freight around the falls, and passage through them was free. In 2019 the Corps decided to hand them off. The Willamette Falls Locks Authority, chartered by the legislature in 2021, is to take ownership once seismic repairs begun in 2023 are finished; the transfer was expected in 2026.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Willamette Falls Locks — still in use below this point — were opened on New Years Day, 1873, when the steamer Maria Wilkins became the first vessel to navigate up the west end of Willamette Falls. Farming and shipping interests had long sought to eliminate expensive portages around this age-old bar to navigation 26 miles above the mouth of the river. The initial project was completed by the Willamette Falls Canal and Locks Company with a partial state subsidy at a cost of $450,000. Five locks-including a canal basin and guard lock at the upper end provide a total lift of 50.2 ft. Carved from native rock and finished with masonry. The locks have concrete sills and are lined with timbers.

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 — 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

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