Bloody 1925 prison break ended badly for everyone involved It was a typical balmy August evening at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The bell had rung for supper, so inmates were streaming out of their cells and heading toward the dining hall for the evening meal, as they always did. But[Read More…]
History
Caralyn Shelton, America’s first woman governor, had crazy early life
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in[Read More…]
Offbeat Oregon History: Body-snatchers planned to hold ex-mayor’s corpse for ransom
The nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpses in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel[Read More…]
Running history finds home at Dorris Ranch
SPRINGFIELD — When you see someone do the impossible, everything becomes possible. That’s what former olympian Ben Blankenship hopes to bring to sustainability – and Springfield, too. Blankenship is the founder of Endless Mileage, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering sustainable environments and programming that inspires the next generation of[Read More…]
Digging into the history of ‘Fruitlands’
An early Lorane orchard getting sprayed. An introduction Oregon’s earliest history lessons usually involve the stories of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the hunters and trappers who provided pelts for trading with the Native Americans, the migration over the Oregon Trail by its early settlers, cattle drives, and gold seekers[Read More…]
Rehabilitation continues for Creswell’s ‘Old Schoolhouse’
PHOTO PROVIDED/ CRESWELL HERITAGE FOUNDATION – Creswell’s Old Schoolhouse. In 2007, Creswell residents Marge Williamson and Carol Campbell undertook to have Creswell’s old schoolhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building had just been vacated because the volunteer library that occupied it since 1927 moved to a[Read More…]
Skill, stout shipbuilding kept shipwreck fatality-free
The U.S.S. Peacock attacking the H.M.S. Nautilus just after the War of 1812, which the Peacock’s skipper was unaware had ended, in 1815. Photo provided/US Navy With all the ships that have come to grief there over the years, and all the sailors who have drowned as a result, it’s[Read More…]
History, here: Posters around town merge past with present
An airfield previously located near Olympic Street between 21st and 28th streets is pictured on the History Here poster installed in that area. Victoria Stephens/The Chronicle SPRINGFIELD – If you haven’t seen the History Here poster on the northeast corner of 18th and Olympic streets, you might not know that[Read More…]
Oregon’s first murder defendant was saved from gallows by his wife
It’s hard to tell, just from reading between the lines of the court documents, but it’s probably a safe guess that Nimrod O’Kelly’s neighbors did not like him. It was the spring of 1852, and the Oregon Trail emigrations had begun a few years earlier. O’Kelly had been one of[Read More…]
Battleship U.S.S. Oregon was lost in Pearl Harbor attack – sort of
The U.S.S. Oregon in dry dock in 1898, two years after launch. When this photo was taken, the Oregon was the most famous warship in the country, and one of the most powerful. PHOTOS COURTESY U.S. NAVY Dec. 7, 1941, was a bad day for American battleships. Four of the[Read More…]