Part 3

The ground for this building was given by Enos Williams, who also gave the village square in front of the church to the children of Amity in perpetuity. The building was erected by a pioneer carpenter, Charles Burch. This building served the congregation until 1912, when the present church building was erected seventy-five feet west of the original structure. The old building was moved to another part of town and is still used for church purposes by another religious communion.

Enos Williams, William Buffum, and Robert Lancefield were charter members of this church. They were leaders in the community, school, and church life of this period. These laymen did not confine their good work to the Amity area alone. When circuit riders Harvey and Burnett founded Bethel College in Polk County, they sent their children to its high school department and college classes, or supported it with financial help. The pioneer Amity Church of Christ is not a story about a wooden building as much as it is a story of great men, both its ministers and its laymen—men who were willing to sacrifice for their faith.

The church at one time was in grave financial difficulty. There was a possibility of losing its building. A member, Heber Martin, then past seventy years of age, went to the bank and offered to mortgage his farm to save the church building from a mortgage foreclosure. Happily, this man’s faith aroused the community and the property was saved.

Bethel College _Dr. James Matthew Alley_

In the figures of the 1850 census, there were no illiterate persons in Polk County. This was due to the high quality of the pioneers who settled in this area of present-day Yamhill and Polk Counties, which was called “The Athens of the West.” Between the years of 1843 and 1860 some of the best educated and most dedicated men ever to come over the Oregon Trail gravitated to this section of the Oregon Territory. Wherever they settled they started a school and a church. Many of them were members of the Christian Church.

It was only natural that a circuit rider preacher, Elder Glen O. Burnett, should call the people of this religious communion together in a camp meeting in an oak grove near Bethel in 1852. At this meeting the idea of Bethel College was conceived.

In 1851 a physician and surgeon, Dr. Nathaniel Hudson, took a land claim in this “Athens of the West.” The first thing he did was to build a log schoolhouse; and in the late spring and early summer of 1852, he held the first public school in the area. Because of his superior education, the Doctor was able to teach the higher branches of education which was not possible in most of the pioneer schools.

In 1854, Dr. Hudson sold his squatters’ rights at Bethel and took a claim two miles west of Dallas. The pioneer families about Bethel had come to depend fully on Dr. Hudson’s school, and its loss was a severe one to the whole community.

Two Christian preachers, Amos Harvey and Glen O. Burnett gave 261 acres of their donation land claims for the financing of Bethel Institute, later Bethel College. This was near the first of the year in 1855. A two-story frame building, 36 × 44 feet in dimension, was proposed. From March until July 4, 1855, materials were gathered on the grounds for the college building “raising.”

On the “glorious Fourth of ’55,” men with their families in wagons began arriving. Some came from great distances. Besides carpenter work, there was a sermon, a patriotic address, and a basket dinner. At the close of the day, the main framework of the building, with its roof in place, was done. The building was finished and dedicated, October 22, 1855. Bethel Institute was chartered by the Territorial Legislature on January 11, 1856. Four years later, on October 19, 1860, Governor John Whiteaker signed the charter of Bethel College, which has never been revoked.

Although for many years Bethel College has ceased to function as far as actual classes are concerned, it still exists. It has a board of trustees, and owns the college property—the ground on which Bethel Elementary Grade School is located. It elects a board of trustees each year, and has the power to grant degrees.

Too little is known about this college which gave Oregon one governor; the wife of a United States Senator; and many who later became lawyers, school teachers, and clergymen. One of the founders of Bethel College, Amos Harvey, gave to the United States Senate his great-granddaughter, the Honorable Maurine Neuberger.

Each year in midsummer the alumni association and the descendants of the pioneers of Bethel gather on the grounds for an all-day picnic and annual meeting.

La Creole Academy at Dallas _Joseph D. Lee_

In Waverly, Ohio, Nicholas Lee and Sarah Hopper were married August 4, 1840. That same year they moved from Ohio to Iowa, while Iowa was still a territory. In the spring of 1847, they left for Oregon, fully equipped with a good team of oxen, two cows (Rose and Lilly) and necessary household goods. Raids by Indians upon the cattle of the train and losses by stampedes left them practically without a team. They threw away much of the household goods and fortunately purchased a yoke of oxen (Dave and George) from another train, enabling them to complete the journey.

The Lees and quite a number of others took the Southern route via Klamath Lake and Cow Creek Canyon. Of the train coming down the Columbia, several stopped at Dr. Marcus Whitman’s station and were ruthlessly murdered or captured in the Indian massacre of November 29 and 30, 1847.

It was late in the fall when the Lees reached the head of the Willamette Valley, for the trip was a hard one, especially Cow Creek Canyon. The cattle were weak and jaded. Elias Briggs, who had safely brought a hive of bees that far, lost them when his wagon was overturned in the water.

The Lees and James Fredericks selected claims and built cabins not far from Eugene Skinner’s, after whom the city of Eugene was named. In the spring of 1848, Frederick and Lee with their families came to Polk County, seeking work and supplies. Their intention was to return, but hearing that the Indians had burned their cabins they decided to remain. They had the use of a two-room cabin for a time.

The winter of 1848 and 1849 was spent by the Lees in Salem. The California gold rush was on, and Mr. Lee, a cooper by trade, made pack saddles that winter and sold them to men leaving for the mines.

In the summer of 1849, they returned to Polk County and bought a claim two and one-half miles south of Dallas. The transition from the cabin to the “new house” was an important event with the pioneer family in 1852. The house is still in use but has been remodeled. Mr. Lee took an active part in establishing church and schools in Dallas and its area. In 1854, he was licensed as a preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and is credited with organizing the original Methodist Society.

In 1855, Mr. Lee took the lead in building a log school house on the John Nicholas place. His two older children attended. Soon afterwards a move started for an independent academy in Dallas. Lee was one of the members of the first board of trustees, and served as treasurer. Land and money were donated, and the town site was moved from the north side of La Creole Creek to the south side.

In 1856-57 were built the new courthouse and jail. The La Creole Academic Institute had two rooms ready for school opening, February 15, 1857. Professor Horace Lyman and Miss Lizzie Boise were the teachers. The Lee children, as they grew large enough, walked three miles to school. To give the children advantage of winter school, Mr. Lee built a house in Dallas, which they occupied at times until the fall of 1862, when Mr. Lee started a small store in Dallas and they moved to town.

The Academy served as a school for all age groups until the 1880’s. The first public grade school building was erected about 1882.

In 1900, La Fayette Seminary, organized by a board of trustees of the Educational Association of the Evangelical church, was incorporated with La Creole Academic Institute in Dallas. It was known as Dallas College and La Creole Academy. The combined schools were endowed by the church. A dormitory was erected in 1900, costing $3000. The Woolen Mill property was purchased for $1,500, and—for the expenditure of about $1,000 in repairs and remodeling—the second floor was converted into a good gymnasium.

The schools closed in 1914 for lack of funds to meet the requirements of Oregon standardization laws.

The David Stump House in Monmouth _David Campbell_

David Stump, of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, was born in Ohio on October 20 (or 29) 1819. As guard, outriding scout and hunter, he came to Oregon with the immigrant train of 1845. An experienced surveyor, his services were in demand for surveying the virgin territory of what is now Benton, Polk, and Yamhill counties. In 1851, he was married to Catherine Elizabeth Chamberlin, who had come, a child of nine, with her family in the wagon train of 1844.

David and Catherine Stump took up a donation claim on the Luckiamute River, six miles south of what later became the village of Monmouth, being among the very first settlers in that part of the Willamette valley. Here they prospered. They became devoted and loyal members of the Christian Church, which soon established a church-supported college in Monmouth. There were two sons and two daughters. When these were ready for higher education, David Stump acquired from the Lindsay family a home in Monmouth adjacent to the college. It stood at the intersection of Jackson and Monmouth streets on the southwest corner of a half-acre tract of land, facing to the west the Victorian Wolverton place, with the Orville Butler home to the north. This became—and continued for many years as—the Stump family home. Here, after a long illness, David Stump died on February 21, 1886.

In the mid-nineties the house was completely renovated and, to a great extent, rebuilt. The roof was raised to give space for a large attic. Rooms and porches were added. The position of the entrances and chimneys was altered. In all, there were now seventeen rooms. Miss Ellen Chamberlain, Mrs. Alice Applegate Peil, Miss Antoinette Bruce, Miss Rose Bassett, Miss Lane, and other members of the Normal faculty lived there around the turn of the century. It became quite a center of college activities. Miss Cassie B. Stump had inherited the property from her father.

There was a good-sized barn at the east end, occupied by a Jersey cow and chickens and ornamented in Autumn with the glowing red of Virginia Creeper. There were a berry patch, a large vegetable garden with morning glories twining the corn stalks, and a row of huge sunflowers. Mrs. Stump and her daughter were great lovers of flowers. They had a small greenhouse for chrysanthemums, smilax, cacti, and various exotic plants. A gnarled Gravenstein produced great, juicy apples. There was a big white fig tree, which froze to the ground periodically, but somehow managed to survive. Directly behind the house stood two exceptionally tall Black Republican cherry trees, a rare sight when in bloom and by July covering the ground inches deep with an over-abundance of ripe fruit. There were madonna lilies, amaryllis, the spike of a yucca, and roses in profusion. A sweet Mission rose, brought to the farm from California, then transplanted to town, was by the front door. Inspired by a visit to the poet, Longfellow, during her student days at Wellesley college, Miss Stump had planted a hedge of lilacs modeled after his in Cambridge.

Not long after Miss Cassie Stump’s death in 1941, the property was acquired by the Oregon College of Education. The old house, by now in a state of disrepair, and the once lovely garden, neglected and overgrown, were removed to make way for the handsome, modernistic library building and the appropriate landscaping with which it is surrounded. A Jack pine and the great maples across the front are about the sole reminders of the former occupancy of the land.

A collection of pictures, records, and mementos of early days at the college is housed in the library. It seems eminently suitable that this particular site should become a permanent part of the campus of the school, in the founding and support of which the Stump family had had such a large share and in which the members had maintained a vital interest over so many years.

Christian College—Oregon Normal School—Oregon College of Education _David Campbell_

The early settlers in the Willamette Valley were not only provident and God-fearing, they were also deeply concerned with higher education for their young people. Academies and colleges sprang up in many of the valley communities. A group of prosperous farmers in Polk County, consecrated members of the Christian Church, gave land and financial support to found a church-affiliated school at Monmouth, to become known as Christian College.

In 1869, Thomas Franklin Campbell was engaged to head this institution. Originally from the deep South, he had come some years previously to Helena, Montana, where he conducted a school for boys and served as circuit judge. He was a man of wide interests and abilities, having served in the Mexican war, and been active as lawyer, minister, and promoter of various public projects. But he was before all else an educator. As a student at Bethany College in Virginia he had lived in the home of Alexander Campbell, founder of the Christian Church. There he had acquired an excellent classical education, had been ordained to the ministry, and had married a cousin of Alexander Campbell, only recently arrived from Ireland.

Responding to the call from Monmouth, with his wife, Jane Eliza and their three sons, he made the long, arduous trip from Helena to Oregon in a stagecoach. The challenging task for the new administrator was to raise funds for a suitable, permanent structure. He solicited earnestly over the state and very soon a brick building, modelled as to general type after the Gothic-inspired architecture of Bethany College, was constructed. It was here that distinguished jurists and others prominent in Oregon life received a thorough grounding in the classics. The curriculum was mostly concerned with Greek, Latin, mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Science was not at that time, as it is with us, a prime consideration. The first graduating class was that of 1871.

By 1892, Christian College had been converted into a State Normal School. There was imperative need in the state to train teachers to meet the growing demands for their services. Prince Lucian Campbell, son of Thomas Franklin Campbell, was now the president. A new wing on the south was added to the original building. This included a science laboratory, several large classrooms, and an assembly hall known as “the Chapel.” The latter has undergone some changes and is at present called “Campbell Hall,” where hang the portraits of the two early presidents.

This new wing was surmounted by a bell tower from which the strong-toned bell peremptorily summoned students to their morning classes. Eventually the enlarged building was balanced with another wing added on the north to house a training school. The whole structure forms truly an historic Oregon Landmark, which is held in fond affection by the many who have studied there.

A sad mutilation occurred in the great wind of Columbus Day 1962. The familiar belfry was toppled to hang precariously. The forlorn picture was featured in newspapers and national magazines as evidence of the violence and destructive power of the unprecedented storm. Many great trees of the ancient fir grove and others on the campus were badly damaged. Much is irreparable, but effort is being made to replace the bell tower and to restore all possible.

The Oregon College of Education, with the other institutions in the State System of Higher Education, is experiencing a record enrollment. There are new and modern buildings to meet increasing demands. To foster tradition and the realization of past accomplishment, and to stress the foundation on which present achievement is based, the preservation and history of this original building at the Oregon College of Education is of signal importance.

Fort Hoskins _Preston E. Onstad_

The site of Fort Hoskins, Benton County’s first military post, was chosen by second lieutenant P. H. Sheridan with the help of Oregon Indian Superintendent, Joel Palmer. The name Hoskins was chosen by the Fort’s first commander, Captain Christopher Colon Augur, as his first official order, on July 26, 1856. For the next nine years Fort Hoskins served as the home and training ground of regular U. S. Army troops as well as volunteers from California, Washington, and Oregon. Although a few troopers from Hoskins knew some anxious moments in the early days, no shots were ever fired into or out of the fort in anger. In fact, the biggest argument to affect the Fort at any time was whether or not there was any excuse for its existence.

Fort Hoskins was located at the Middle Pass over the Coast Range of mountains to keep the surviving Indian participants of the Rogue River War on the reservation which General Palmer had prepared for them on the Oregon coast, near the present towns of Newport and Siletz. However, the post was so far—some thirty miles from the Indians—that a blockhouse had to be established on the upper prairie of the Siletz River. Fort Hoskins supplied men, munitions, and materiel for the blockhouse.

Of the later generals who served there, at least two became famous: Philip Sheridan, who located the site of the Fort and served as its first quartermaster and commissary of supplies; and C. C. Augur, who, during his five years in command, learned how to deal with his superiors the hard way—by letter. In the Civil War, Sheridan started his climb to fame as a commissary officer; and Augur, who had developed into a persuasive writer, not only won battles but served with distinction on many military courts and committees, where his early training in mental organization served him well.

Fort Hoskins also provided a training camp for western volunteers between 1862 and the end of the Rebellion, although few of the men who trained there ever heard the whir of Indian arrow or the whine of enemy shot. They did, however, learn the rudiments of the military discipline of living month in and month out with themselves and with crushing boredom. At first only a sutler’s store catered to the wants of the soldiers, but at length a Corvallis firm, hard on the trail of easy money, opened an establishment near the post that dealt in a commodity the sutler’s store was not allowed to sell: spirits.

No Indians ever tried to attack Fort Hoskins, but during the turbulent days of the Civil War, threats were made against the undermanned Fort by Secessionists, of which there were many in the immediate neighborhood. The nearest town of any size, Corvallis, was notoriously sympathetic to the cause of the South and was contemptuously known in other parts of the state of Oregon as the only town that ever had a Copperhead mayor. To make matters worse, this worthy was twice elected. Certain Southern sympathizers were organized into a secret state-wide society called the “Knights of the Golden Circle.”

Fort Hoskins was permanently evacuated on April 13, 1865, the last company to leave being Captain Waters’ Company F of the First Oregon Volunteer Infantry. A year later the buildings were auctioned off, and the land, which had been rented, was returned to the owners. In the accompanying photograph, the cluster of unpainted farm buildings, left of center, stand on what was once the parade ground of Fort Hoskins. The large farmhouse behind the trees, at the right, rests on the site of the old hospital. On the light-colored field between the trees and the hill, soldiers once drilled and learned how to shoot at distant targets. Time and distance have lent enchantment, of a sort that never really existed, to the history of a lonely little frontier Fort in an all-but-forgotten corner of Oregon.

Bishop Simpson’s Chapel _Madeleine L. Nichols_

In 1858, the old Simpson’s Chapel was completed. It stood on a hill about halfway between the present towns of Bellfountain and Alpine. The church was built of hand-planed lumber and was a plain oblong with three windows on each side and a porch in front. It was surrounded by oak trees, many of which are still standing and which served as hitching posts for horses.

The history of the Alpine community may be said to have had its beginning at the time of the erection of two buildings, the Ebenezer school house and Simpson’s Chapel, though it is true that quite a number of settlers had come to the valley before that time. The school house was built of logs and was situated on a promontory about two miles south of the present town of Alpine and on part of the old Gilbert place. It was probably built about 1849 and served both as a school and a “meeting house.”

It was and always has been a Methodist Church and was called Simpson’s Chapel because Bishop Simpson was the presiding officer of the first annual conference, held while the group was still meeting in the old Ebenezer school. In 1903, it was decided that a new church was needed, so one was built at the present site of Alpine and was completed in 1904. At this time the congregation divided, part of its members going to Bellfountain and part to Alpine.

The whole community was once known as the Belknap settlement because of the preponderance of Belknaps among the first settlers who, in pioneer days, had come by wagon train to the valley from Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. Other early families were the Starrs, Hawleys, Howards, Gilberts, Catons, Woodcocks, Goodmans, and Nichols.

Another interesting part of the early history of the Chapel centered around the campground which, in 1871, was bought from George Humphrey and is known as the Bellfountain Park. People came from miles around, primarily for the spring of clear cold water, held meetings, and visited. The gatherings were religious but also social. People would bring food, put up tents, and stay for a week or more. Sometimes someone would bring part of a beef and hang it on a tree and those present were free to help themselves. The pioneer days are gone but Simpsons Chapel is still used as a house of worship by those who have taken the place of the pioneers.

The Mitchell Wilkins Family Home _Lucia Wilkins Moore_

In 1847, Mitchell Wilkins and his young wife, Permelia Ann Allen, then eighteen, arrived on foot at “The Falls.” He was twenty-nine. Their wagon, plus goods and tools, were beside the Barlow Road with the last-dying oxen. Permelia’s father Robert Allen, still driving wagon and ox team, made their last miles easier. The three pushed on from Oregon City toward Silverton and, on October 1, came to Butte Creek. There they halted to build cabins, plow, and plant. Ten months later my father was born. When the baby, Francis Marion, was two months old, Mitchell Wilkins took a land claim in upper Willamette Valley, edging the Coburg hills. During the sixty years he lived there, the 640 acres grew to 20,000.