Willamette Falls

This board stands on the West Linn side, above falls that still make power. The 1889 powerhouse that first lit Portland stood on the Oregon City bank and closed in 1897. Its successor, Station B, opened on this side in 1895 and never stopped. In 1953 Portland General Electric renamed it for Thomas W. Sullivan, the hydraulic engineer who designed it, and it still generates about sixteen megawatts. In a 2008 photograph, two painted-over lines of some earlier text show faintly beneath the board's last line, unreadable.

What the plaque says

Oregon History 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 this area to the city of Portland in 1889.

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