Willamette Post was established in December 1813 on a knoll just east of this location by employees of the North West Company, a Montreal-based fur-trading company. During the ensuing years, the two-room log cabin, also known as Fort Kalapuya, served as a site for trading with the local Indians, the Kalapuyans. It was also a depot for hunting expeditions providing food to Fort George, also known as Fort Astoria, on the Oregon Coast. The post was still intact in the late 1820s, as French-Indian families began to settle in the French Prairie Champoeg area. Pierre Bellique, a French Canadian fur trapper turned farmer, and his wife, Genevieve, used the vacated building as a residence beginning in the early 1830s.