Willamette Post

The register has carried at least three texts for this spot. One credited John Jacob Astor's company with founding the post in 1811 and called it the first trading post in the Willamette Valley, both wrong. The first was Wallace House, built by Astor's men in 1812 north of the Kalapuya village of Chemeketa, near present Keizer, and mostly abandoned once the company sold out to the North West Company in 1813. A later board, photographed in 2017, gave the post to the Nor'westers that December; the current one adds the Kalapuyan village and Genevieve St. Martin's Chinook family.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Willamette Post Willamette Post was established in December 1813, on a knoll just east of here, by the Montreal-based North West Company, close to the Kalapuyan village of Champeog. The two-room log cabin, also called Fort Kalapuya, was a place for trade and a depot for fur-trapping and hunting expeditions supplying the North West Company's Fort George near the mouth of the Columbia River. The post was still standing in the late 1820s, as French Canadian-Native American families began to settle in this area called French Prairie. Retired Hudson's Bay Company voyageur Pierre Belleque and his French Canadian-Chinook wife, Genevieve St. Martin, used the building as their family home beginning in the early 1830s. It was swept away in the 1861 flood.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Champoeg — 2.7 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.
• Willamette Falls — 17 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 — 18 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.
• Vanport — 26 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

• Champoeg — 1.9 mi
• Dayton Blockhouse — 7.1 mi
• Boone's Ferry — 8.2 mi
• Joel Perkins — 8.3 mi