Avery Park Applegate Trail Kiosk

In 1846 Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall as an alternative to the perilous last leg of the Oregon Trail down the Columbia River, and the first emigrants left Fort Hall in early August 1846 with Levi Scott as guide while Applegate went ahead to mark the route, blazing nearly 500 miles of wilderness before reaching the upper Willamette Valley in November; in later years travel along the Applegate Trail contributed greatly to the settlement of southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley. That same year Joseph C. Avery envisioned his claim at the junction of the Marys and Willamette rivers becoming a city, platted a town, began selling lots in 1849, and helped form a community known as Marysville and Corvallis that gained a post office in January 1850, was described in 1855 as a small one-street town, and came to be identified with education through Corvallis College, founded in 1852, a state school established in 1885, a new campus begun in 1887, and the later evolution of Oregon Agricultural College into Oregon State College in 1932 and Oregon State University. For overland emigrants, rivers remained among the greatest dangers, and after crossing streams such as the Platte, Sweetwater, Green, Klamath, Rogue, South Umpqua, North Umpqua, and Long Tom, many families found the Marys River nearly the last obstacle, with steep muddy banks, winter rains, and an uncertain bottom requiring wagons to be dismantled and ferried by wagon box or canoe. The route along the west side of the Willamette Valley had earlier drawn fur trappers in the 1820s and 1830s, botanist David Douglas in 1826, Methodist missionaries Jason Lee, Gustavus Hines, and Dr. Elijah White in 1840, and members of the U.S. South Seas Surveying and Exploring Expedition under Lt. George Foster Emmons in 1841, but when emigrants began arriving in 1846 the road still lacked bridges, ferries, grades, and gravel. Corvallis, first known as Marysville, later occupied a critical place in the movement of travelers and freight through the western Willamette Valley as a year-round steamboat head of navigation, a stop on the Territorial Road and later stage routes, and a railroad point for T. Egenton Hogg’s Oregon Pacific. The broader setting included the resolution of the Oregon boundary dispute, in which Spain ceded discovery rights to the U.S. in 1819, Russia did so in 1824, Britain and the U.S. agreed to joint occupancy in 1818, overland migration surged after 1843, and after the 1844 campaign demand for American control, Britain yielded and the United States secured what are now Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana. The coming of settlers also led to pressure on the Kalapuya Indians, and after Congress created the Willamette Valley Treaty Commission in 1850, Luckiamute leaders resisted removal from their homeland in 1851, winning temporary agreement to remain when a treaty signed on May 2, 1851 was never approved by the Senate, but in 1855 a new treaty was negotiated, signed, and ratified, and they were removed to the Grande Ronde Reservation.

Corvallis, Oregon · United States