Champoeg

Champoeg sits on a bend of the Willamette at the north end of French Prairie, ground that was Kalapuya country before retired fur-company men and their families began farming it. Trails from north and south met at the river here, and by the 1840s there was a landing, a Hudson's Bay Company warehouse and a scattering of houses. On May 2, 1843, settlers met on the meadow and voted to organize a provisional government.

Champoeg grew into a town, with streets laid out and lots sold, and in December 1861 it stopped being one. A warm Chinook wind melted the snow in the Cascades on top of weeks of rain, the Willamette rose some fifty-five feet above its summer level, and fast water swept over the townsite and carried off everything except the Hudson's Bay warehouse. Afterward, one witness wrote, there was nothing to see but drifting sand. The flood of 1890 came nearly as high. The town was never rebuilt.

The state heritage area keeps the empty townsite, its street grid still faintly visible in the grass, along with a visitor center and a monument on the site of the 1843 meeting. The ground is an archaeological district, and digs here have turned up the only largely intact early homesite yet found on French Prairie.