Courthouse Square Park reflects the civic and commercial ambitions of Dayton’s founders, Joel Palmer, his son-in-law Andrew Smith, and Christopher Taylor. Palmer and Taylor, who settled there to farm in 1848, laid out the town site on the banks of the Yamhill River in 1850, and Taylor became the first postmaster in 1851. Hoping Dayton would become the county seat of Yamhill County, the founders planned for a courthouse to stand on that block, but when none was built, it became the town square, with a bandstand, fountain, war memorial, and a historic blockhouse. The blockhouse had served from 1856 to 1866 at Fort Yamhill, a U.S. Army post about thirty miles west of Dayton that stood as a buffer at the western edge of the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, where many Western Oregon Native people were forcibly relocated after the wars of 1851-1856. After the fort was abandoned, the blockhouse was moved to Old Grand Ronde and used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a jail and storage building. Its unusual design, with the upper block the same size as the lower but turned on a true diagonal, allowed rifles to be fired from all eight sides every 45 degrees instead of from four sides every 90 degrees. Joel Palmer, an Oregon pioneer born in 1810 who came from Indiana in 1845, helped forge the Barlow Road around Mount Hood and served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon from 1853 to 1856. Known as “General” Joel Palmer, he established the western Oregon reservations and led the way for removal of the tribes, which kept tribes safe from settler attacks, but he was forced from office after being accused of favoring Native interests over those of immigrant settlers. The blockhouse was neglected until John G. Lewis of Dayton arranged in 1911 to acquire it from the U.S. government and have it moved to Courthouse Square Park as a memorial to Joel Palmer.