1910 Downtown

Jump to Chapters: 1. INTRODUCTION 2. LEBANON IS NAMED 3. INDIANS HARDLY A FACTOR

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of Lebanon, Oregon, most westerly and progressive of all the Lebanons. It is a story of a town founded by American wagon-train pioneers who searched a vast continent for a land of heart's desire where they could build their homes and sink their ploughs. They found it one morning as their wagon trains came to rest in the saving green grass of a valley floor and it has been handed down in story to the present day that on that morning men stood in the saddle stirrups and women looked out from the open ends of the Conestoga wagons to smile and weep and laugh and pray in Thanksgiving for having been guided to a new homeland so beautiful and so abundant.

But it is more than a pioneer story of log cabins and crude ploughs and seeds that had been carried across a continent for planting in a new land. It is a story of typical western American development, with all the romance, all the sorrow and all the joy, all the weal and woe and all the radiant and dimming rainbows of a community glowing across the years. And finally it becomes a story of a progressive Lebanon, finding its place in a national economy - a Lebanon of definite importance to a nation facing her greatest crisis. For almost side-by-side with the descendants of those who came to set the stakes for farming, march the modern of industry who came to make good use of the great forests behind Lebanon in the making of paper, plywood, and other commodities which America needs so desperately now.

The settlement of Lebanon was part of a dramatic national movement - the expansion of a vigorous people, the westward trek of home builders.

Adventurous young men singly and in groups came to the northwest coast with the various exploring and trading parties of the first part of the last century, many staying on and striking out for themselves. Even before the discovery of gold in California, glamorous stories were told of that Spanish colony and often these hard adventurers headed south overland. As they had to live off the country they often camped for weeks and even months at a time in places where they found sheltered spots and good hunting. Many of them in this way picked out places which they wanted for their own and later returning did take those very tracts as homesteads. Thus it was that some of the earliest settlers came to this vicinity.

When the modern town of Lebanon celebrated its Centennial in 1947, the Lebanon Express chronicled the community's beginnings well. A simple paragraph related that late in the autumn of 1847 Jeremiah Ralston halted his train of three wagons and twelve yoke of oxen at the cabin of William Hawk and Thomas Morgan. It was the end of the long arduous trek across two thousand miles of plains, mountains and deserts which Ralston had begun with his wife and four children that spring. At South Platte, a fifth child, Charles, was born. Jeremiah Ralston bought property from Hawk, Morgan and William Smith to form the nucleus for the settlement which later became the city of Lebanon.

What is now Lebanon was marked on some of the very early maps as "Peterson's Gap" because of Asa Peterson, one of the very early settlers, who pushing south from Oregon City, took land just a few miles southwest of where the town later developed. The hill still called "Peterson's Butte" was part of that claim.

As the value of the great northwest became apparent, congress passed the donation land law which allowed families to take claims to 640 acres. This was to further stimulate immigration. More than 8,000 claims were registered under this law and it is on such land that Lebanon was built.

Luther Elkins

During the winter of 1845 two young men, William Hawk and William Smith spent several months near what is now the corner of Grove and Maple Streets and built a small cabin. In order to have the boundaries of his claim parallel, when the Ralston family staked out their claim, Jeremiah Ralston made a trade with these young men. Hawk left the vicinity, though he later located in another part of Linn County, but Smith crossed the river and took land still owned by his sons.

In 1848, a year before the territorial government was organized, the first election was held in what is now Lebanon, then called Kees' Precinct. At this election, held in the home of Morgan Kees, thirty-eight votes were polled. The judges were Morgan Kees, J. Ralston and William Gore - the clerks were Elmore Gallaher and Asa Peterson.

The first houses were of logs and around each cabin was a cleared spot for a garden. Within a couple of seasons food was abundant. Much of what is now Lebanon was then wheat fields and while they were small compared with the fields on the prairie, they did not have to be very large when the yield was 60 to 70 bushes to the acre. During the first few years all of the grain was taken to Oregon City or Salem to be ground, such journeys taking a week or more. Enough grain would be taken by ox teams or pack horses to provide the family with meal for a year.

But as more families came and there was more and more meal to be ground, milling facilities were a logical development. Some of the early millers were Jonathan Wassom, James Cowan, John Little, Luther Elkins and Richard Cheadle. By 1875 the Lebanon Flour Mill was grinding 160 barrels of flour a day, the power being taken from the river.

While the first houses were of logs, saw mills were soon built and after Jeremiah Ralston built the first frame house, so many other frame houses were put up that S. A. Nickerson added a sash and lumber mill to his saw mill business. But the sawmills remained smaller than the flour mill, because of the difficulty of transportation. It was harder to sling their products across the back of a horse.

With stock, gardens and plenty of meal from their own wheat, the early settlers were almost self-sustaining and the stores were few and small. When Jeremiah Ralston came west he brought a supply of staples and opened a store where the Lebanon 5 & 10 store now stands, and Luther Elkins had another store on the corner where the Irish-Warner drive-in market is located.

LEBANON IS NAMED

It was Jeremiah Ralston who first platted the town and named it. He chose the name because of the many cedar trees by the river made him think of the Biblical references to the cedars of Lebanon and because of sentiment for his birthplace - Lebanon, Tennessee.

An interesting point in connection with the naming of Lebanon is that during the forties there was another settlement in the Waldo Hills named Lebanon, a settlement with enough population to allow it a post office. The post office was discontinued before this town of Lebanon was platted in 1852.

Richmond Cheadle, who was one of the early settlers to take a donation land claim south of town, was a Baptist minister who served the Baptist churches in Oregon.

The new name did not take very well at first and for a while the little village was rather derisively called "Pinhook." Fortunately the plat with the name Lebanon was registered and when the mail service was established the post office was called Lebanon. But that was a decade later. During the first years all the mail came to Oregon City and then was carried to the more remote settlements on horseback, the carrier who brought the mail to Lebanon going on to Brownsville. The mail was usually left at the hotel, but question sometimes came up as to which log house was the hotel, for all were hospitable that every house was open to travelers.

INDIANS HARDLY A FACTOR

Stories about Indians told by the early settlers had, for the most part, to do with the events on their journeys across the plains where the war-like tribes were a danger to the white man's caravans. The natives found here on the coast were neither as vigorous nor as hostile as those east of the mountains and when they approached the newcomers it was usually to beg food. While many of the young men who settled here took part in Indian wars, they were in the struggles east of the mountains: the Modoc, Cayuse, Rogue River and Klamath Indian wars.

These Coast Indians, "fisheaters" as they were called, like their more aggressive cousins, soon fell victims to the white man's diseases and fire water. Their numbers were reduced tragically soon, the remnants of the tribes retreating to the reservations. Most of those who lived here went to the Siletz country and only their name, Santiam, remains to remind us of their existence. Chiefly it designates the river so useful to the community.

Rebecca Bell Parents: John and Lurana Bell

A few Indians remained among the whites and led rather squalid lives. The last one in Lebanon was an old Indian called Joe, who lived with his squaw in a miserable cabin on what is now Hiatt Street. He died in 1870 and the white men buried him in the old Indian cemetery near where the nut plant now stands.

The first place that we find the name Santiam written was in the journal of the Reverend Gustavus Hines in which he kept a detailed account of a preaching mission on which he accompanied the Reverend Jason Lee from Salem to the Umpqua, in 1840. In this he tells about camping by a river which he called the "Santa Ama". He probably thought it was like the name of the Spanish mission in California.

John Minto, who was an outstanding member of the migration of 1844, wrote in his memoirs of a chief called "San-de-ham" a chief of a branch of the Calapooia Indians at that time throught to number about eight thousand. And it was Chief Papea, a descendant of Chief San-de-ham who signed the treaty with the United States government which gave the white man title to all the land in the Willamette Valley east of the river.

"Ahalapam," Mr. Minto says further, was an indian form of the same name which they applied to the cinder field north of the Three Sisters where the early settlers thought the Santiam river had its source.

When gold was first discovered in California so many of the new settlers in Oregon went south that some feared Oregon would be depopulated, but the donation land law was such an inducement to settlement here that many of the gold seekers returned and it was often said, found more gold in Oregon's fields than in California's streams.

In many parts of the Willamette valley redwood and walnut trees, grown from nuts brought back in the packs of the returning gold seekers, are memorials to these young men. While there are no redwood near Lebanon, tradition has it that some of our largest walnut trees grew from nuts planted by the young homesteaders who returned from California and took claims here.

By 1848 enough crops were being raised in Oregon so that lucrative business grew up packing flour and meat to the California camps by wagon and pack trains. Many early Lebanon residents took part in this business.

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Lebanon Genealogical Society
© 1998 Jan Phillips
First posted January 1998