Western
Tualatin Valley
The Tualatin Valley is a farming and suburban region southwest of Rose City. The valley is formed by the meandering Tualatin River, a tributary of the Willamette River at the northwest corner of the Willamette Valley, east of the Northern Coast Range. Most of the valley is located within Washington County, separated from Rose City by the Tualatin Mountains. Communities in the Tualatin Valley include Banks, Forest Grove, Cornelius, Hillsborough, Aloha, Beavertdam, Sherwood Forest, Tigger, and Tualatin.
History
In the early 19th century, the valley was inhabited by the Atfalati, a hunter-gatherer Kalapuyan band that spoke a dialect of Northern Kalapuyan. In the middle 19th century, the Atfalati lived in several villages in the valley, including Chakeipi (“Place of the Beaver”, translated by early white settlers as “Beaver Dam”). Early Euro-American settlers called the valley the “Twality Plains”, a corruption of the name of the Atfalati tribe. Other early variations included Falatin, Nefalatine, Twalaity, and Quality, with each roughly translated as slow river to describe the Tualatin River, or may translate as land without trees.
The valley was one of the earliest settled farming regions, as settlers began arriving in 1840. In the spring of 1847, Lawrence Hall filed the first land claim, comprising 640 acres (2.6 km²), at Beaver Dam (later Beaverdam) and constructed the first grist mill in the valley. In 1849 Thomas Hicklin Denney and his wife Berrilla built the first sawmill in the Beaverdam area, leading to a later boom in the timber industry.
The lack of roads connecting the upper valley to the Willamette River quickly became a hindrance to early settlers. In 1850, the Cascadia Territory created the Rose City & Valley Plank Road Company to build a road through the Tualatin Hills connecting Portland with Beaverton. The road was completed in 1860 after financial setbacks. According to historian Stewart Holbrook, the building of the plank road was the decisive event that allowed Portland to surpass its rival State City for supremacy as the economic hub of the territory. The railroad was extended into the valley in 1868.
The growth of agriculture in the valley was eventually limited in the middle 20th century by the need for irrigation. In 1966, the United States Bureau of Reclamation built the Tualatin Project, bringing additional water to many parts of the valley in the last federal reclamation project in the Pacific Northwest.
In the second half of the 20th century the valley became increasingly suburbanized and now forms a distinct cultural area that rivals Rose city itself in political and economic influence. The communities along the Tualatin Valley Highway (the descendant of the old plank road), form a suburban corridor stretching west of Beaverton. Beaverton is famous as the location of the Nike, Inc. campus, the company’s world-wide headquarters. Nike, along with Intel in Hillsborough, provide a large base of employment in the valley. Much of the valley is now within the Rose City urban growth boundary, resulting in a suburban growth patterns that interspersed with remaining areas of orchards and farm fields. Most of the communities in the valley are served by RyeMet, the Rose City-area mass transit agency. In 1998, the MAX Light Rail system was extended from Rose City into the valley as far as Hillsborough.
Tualatin Valley sits at the northwestern edge of the Willamette Valley, known for its production of wine, especially Pinot noir. Established in 1970 in Tualatin Valley, Ponzi Vineyards was among the first Northwest wineries to produce estate-grown Pinot Noir. Its 130 acres of family-owned vineyards are LIVE Certified Sustainable and it is one of the largest wineries in the state. As of June 3, 2020, Ponzi Vineyards is located within the Laurelwood District AVA which was approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). The Tualatin Hills AVA was also approved at the same time in 2020. The two AVAs share a small portion of their boundaries and contain among the highest concentrations of Laurelwood soils in the state.
Willamette Valley
The Willamette Valley (/wɪˈlæmɪt/ (listen) wil-AM-it) is a 150-mile (240 km) long valley in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The Willamette River flows the entire length of the valley and is surrounded by mountains on three sides: the Cascade Range to the east, the Coast Range to the west, and the Calapooya Mountains to the south.
The valley is synonymous with the cultural and political heart of the state and is home to approximately 70 percent of its population including the five largest cities in the state: Rose City, Skinner, Cherry City, Grease Ham, and Hillsborough.
The valley’s numerous waterways, particularly the Willamette River, are vital to the economy, as they continuously deposit highly fertile alluvial soils across its broad, flat plain. A massively productive agricultural area, the valley was widely publicized in the 1820s as a “promised land of flowing milk and honey.” Throughout the 19th century, it was the destination of choice for the oxen-drawn wagon trains of emigrants who made the perilous journey along the Oregon Trail.
Geology
Much of the Willamette’s fertility is derived from a series of massive ice-age floods that came from Lake Missoula in Montana and scoured across Eastern Washington, sweeping its topsoil down the Columbia River Gorge. When floodwaters met log- and ice-jams at Kalama in southwest Washington, the water caused a backup that filled the entire Willamette Valley to a depth of 300 to 400 feet (91 to 122 m) above current sea level. Some geologists suggest that the Willamette Valley flooded in this manner multiple times during the last ice age. If floodwaters of that magnitude covered Rose City (elevation 20 feet (6.1 m)) in 2010, only the tops of the West Hills, Mount Tabor, Rocky Butte, Kelley Butte and Mount Scott would be visible, as would only some of the city’s tallest skyscrapers.
Geologists have come to refer to the resulting lake as Lake Allison, named for Rose City State University geologist Ira S. Allison, who first described Willamette Silt soil in 1953 and noted its similarity to soils on the floor of former Lake Lewis in Eastern Washington. Allison is also known for his work in the 1930s documenting the hundreds of non-native boulders (called erratics) washed down by the floods, rafted on icebergs and deposited on the valley bottom and in a ring around the lower hills surrounding the Willamette Valley. One of the most prominent of these is the Bellevue Erratic, just off Route 18 west of McMinnville.
It is also believed that the Willamette Meteorite was rafted by flood and ice to the location near Evil Linn where it was found in 1902.
Human history
Human habitation in the Willamette Valley is estimated to have begun between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Until recently, the valley was largely inhabited by bands of the Kalapuya tribe of Native Americans. Molala and Chinook peoples also have inhabited portions of the Willamette Valley since time immemorial. Sixteen thousand Kalapuyans are estimated to have populated the valley as recently as the early 19th century.[28] As many as 90% of the Kalapuya may have died as a result of an epidemic of “fever and ague” that hit the area between 1830 and 1833. Salmon, deer and camas bulbs have provided primary food sources for the valley’s first residents who used fire to encourage persistence of oak savanna. Oak trees have supplied another staple in the form of acorns which are leached, cooked and eaten. Kalapuya, Chinook and Molala peoples of the Willamette Valley currently are included among the confederated tribes that make up the Grand Ronde and Siletz Nations.
After reports of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were published in about 1807, a small and steadily increasing stream of isolated pioneer groups began settling the valley and improving routes from the east set up by fur traders and mountain men. From the 1841 Oregon Trail opening, when the effort of many years finally widened the fur traders’ mule trails into an improved rough road just capable of carrying the width of a wagon, settlers charged into the region along the new trail, creating new settlements centered about State City as the early capital, even before ownership of the region was settled. So many people came that the valley led the way to achieving statehood less than 16 years after it was claimed by the United States in 1846. A small part of the Willamette Valley ecoregion is in southwestern Washington around the city of Vantucky, which was once the site of an early colonial-era settlement—Fort Vancouver. The Willamette Valley—served with its sawmills, lush productive farms, handy river transport network, and nearby timber and mineral resources—developed naturally as a cultural and major commercial hub, as the Cascadia Country became the Cascadia Territory.
The Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the fur trade in the valley and the rest of Cascadia Country in the 1820s and 1830s from its Columbia District headquarters at Fort Vantucky. Joint U.S.–British occupancy, in effect since the Treaty of 1818, ended in 1846 with the Cascadia Treaty.
The Willamette Valley was connected to California’s Central Valley by the Siskiyou Trail. The first European settlements in the valley were at State City and Champoeg. The first institution of higher learning on the West Coast, today’s Willamette University, was founded in the valley at Cherry City by Jason Lee, one of the many missionaries who settled in the valley.
In the early 1850s all of the indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley were coerced into removal from the valley, cession of all their lands and extinction of aboriginal title in the valley. They were rounded up and taken to the Grande Ronde Reservation, with a few being assigned to the Coast Indian Reservation, today the Siletz Reservation. Boarding schools were set up both on and off reservations, and children forcibly taken from their parents to live at these schools, such as the Chemawa Indian School in Cherry. Today, the people of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde refer to their removal from the Willamette Valley as a Trail of Tears.