CHAPTER XX
1810—1911
AGRICULTURE—HORTICULTURE—ANIMAL INDUSTRIES—FARMS, FARM LANDS AND VALUES—COMMERCE—MANUFACTURES—THE STATE FAIR—THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPOSITION.
Cultivation of the soil for food in Oregon was commenced at Oak Point on the south side of the Columbia river in the year 1810 by Capt. Nathan Winship of Boston, Mass. Captain Winship and his brother Jonathan had decided to establish a trading post on the Columbia river, and this point was selected for the enterprise. Here they cleared some land in May, 1810, commenced building a house and planted a garden, but on account of the annual Columbia river freshet they were forced to abandon the site and move to higher ground.
In 1811 the Astor men building the Fort at Astoria in May of that year planted twelve potatoes that had been brought from New York around Cape Horn, which started the cultivation of potatoes in Oregon, and from the twelve first planted a crop of fifty bushels was produced in 1813. The first bushel of wheat was brought overland from Canada by order of Dr. John McLoughlin in 1825, and was planted that year. In 1837 Lieut. Slacum reported to the U. S. War Department that the H. B. Co. had produced on their farm near Vancouver that year 8,000 bushels of wheat, 5,500 bushels of barley, 6,000 bushels of oats, 9,000 bushels of peas, and 14,000 bushels of potatoes, besides turnips, pumpkins and other vegetables. At that time the Company had 1,000 head of beef cattle, 700 hogs, 200 sheep, 500 horses and forty yoke of working oxen, a threshing machine, a flouring mill and a distillery. Outside of the Hudson's Bay Company the first farms were opened in Marion county, Louis Bichette settling near Champoeg in 1825, Joseph Gervais near where the town of Gervais is located, in 1828, and Etienne Lucier in 1830. A number of the remnants of the Wilson Price Hunt party also settled on the prairie near Gervais and Lucier; and all of them being Canadian Frenchmen they gave the name to the neighborhood — "French Prairie," which identifies that region to this day. When Jason Lee came in 183-4 he found here these Frenchmen and although they were all Catholics, and he was a Methodist, he deemed it a good place to found a mission and start the first school in the Willamette valley. These first farmers and Americans who came in 1843 and 4 prospered in raising wheat, as the H. B. Company took all they raised at a fair price. Gervais had the first orchard in the present state of Oregon, his trees having been procured from Dr. McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver; but they were all seedling apples, and not to be compared with the grafted fruit introduced by Luelling in the fall of 1847.
The first market the pioneer Oregon farmers had for their wheat was the
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