SALEM.Passing up the river, the next important place we meet is Salem, the capital of the State. The State Capitol stands on elevated ground about a mile back from the river, with a large, green space in front, planted with ornamental trees and shrubs. The scene from the great windows at the back is really grand, Mount Jefferson being in full view, and the line of the Cascades in ridge after ridge displayed in all their beauty. Fronting the Capitol buildings at the other side of the Park are the Court-House and offices of Marion County, also a substantial and handsome pile. On the southern side of the Capitol stand the buildings of the Willamette University.
The town of Salem is now growing. It has the advantage of a splendid water-power, called Mill Creek, which is turned to good account before it reaches the Willamette just below the city. On it are placed the Pioneer Oil-Mills, where linseed-oil and linseed-cake are produced, of excellent quality and moderate price; also a large building now used both as an implement-factory and as a flour-mill; this has lately changed hands, and it is too soon yet to speak of its success. Below this are placed the "Salem Flour-Mills" of Kinney Brothers & Co. Their brand is recognized and approved in all the markets of the world—as it ought to be, if the best of wheat turned into the best of flour, and its sale honestly and intelligently carried out, can command success. The mills are fine buildings, fitted with the most modern and powerful machinery, and stand just on the edge of the Willamette, with a dock where the river-steamers can deliver wheat and receive flour. I believe that this last fall of 1881 they converted 600,000 bushels of wheat into flour. A switch from the Oregon and California Railroad runs from the main line to the mills on the other side, and is proving an immense convenience to the city generally as well as to the mills.
The steamboat pauses on its upward journey at Buena Vista, to take in and deliver freight for the pottery there, already extensive, and which by the excellence of its productions demonstrates that it only needs further capital and enlarged business relations to do an important share of the trade of the coast. The glaze on the ware is very good, made from a mineral earth found in the bank of the Willamette at Corvallis.
After passing the mouth of the Santiam, the most considerable tributary of the Willamette, we stop at Albany. This is one of the best situated and most progressive towns in the State. Although with a little less than two thousand inhabitants at present, it has all the enterprise and "go" of a town in Europe of five times that number. There are here also three large flour-mills, the brands of some of which are known and prized in Liverpool, to which port cargoes are frequently sent.
Albany has a lumber-mill, foundry, twine-mill, and scutching-mill, fruit-drying works, sash and door factory, and soon will have woolen-mills also. The making of the place is the water-power of the Santiam River, brought in a canal for thirteen miles through the level prairie-land, but rushing through the town and supplying the mills and factories with a flow and force of water sufficient for double as many works as at present use it. The town is supplied with water for domestic purposes from the same source, of clearness and purity that it is hard to equal.
Albany has three newspapers, six churches, a very good collegiate school, and excellent common schools. It is a principal station on the Oregon and California Railroad, and also an important station on the Oregon Pacific, now so rapidly building, and its point of crossing the Oregon and California, and a junction for the branch line to Lebanon, away there under the slopes of the Cascades. Land in the neighborhood of the town, and indeed throughout the level portions of Linn County, ranging over an area of nearly twenty miles each way, is worth from twenty-five to sixty dollars an acre—the last sale I heard of, of one hundred and thirty-two acres, about five miles from the town, being at thirty-nine dollars an acre.
CORVALLIS AND EUGENE CITY.The next town we come to is our own Corvallis, appropriately named as the heart of the valley. It is indeed fitly placed as the valley starting-point seaward of the Oregon Pacific Railroad, being on the direct line east and west between Yaquina Bay, the Mount Jefferson Pass through the Cascades, Prineville, in Eastern Oregon, Harney Lake and Valley, the Malheur River and Valley, and Boisé City—the meeting-place in the near future of divers transcontinental lines.
Corvallis has been too fully described in these pages to need further reference here. The commencement of energetic construction of the Oregon Pacific and the assurance of its early completion have given an increased business-life to the place which impresses the visitor strongly with the idea of rapid future growth.
Continuing in our steamboat to the head of the Willamette navigation, we pass the little towns of Peoria and Harrisburg, and at last reach Eugene City. This, which is the chief town of Lane County, is blessed with a university, presided over by excellent professors, one of whom, Professor Condon, has a name and fame as a geologist far beyond the limits of his county and also of the State. I trust the time will soon come when the liberality of the Legislature of Oregon will provide the funds necessary to enable Professor Condon to complete and publish the systematic geology and mineralogy of Oregon, the materials for which are already to a large extent in his possession, the result of years of careful study and journeyings over the State.
Eugene City is a lively, pleasant little town, but has not yet attained any manufacturing or industrial development like some of the other towns in Oregon. This is to come.