Since its founding, Oregon City has been flooded repeatedly. Oregon's first elected governor, George Abernethy, was all but wiped out in 1861 when eighteen days of rain caused serious flooding throughout the lower Willamette Valley. Abernethy moved to Portland and started over, but Oregon City's residents have cleaned up and rebuilt in the wake of seven more major floods since then. The difficulties involved in shoehorning a town into a shelf of rock at the base of a tall, steep bluff have been remarked upon since the 1840s, but the industrial district around Willamette Falls has always been too important to abandon to the vagaries of the river. The riverside area is the "Old Town" of Oregon City, the first part of town to be settled and developed, and it was for many years the seat of local government and culture. The first opera house and Masonic lodge in Oregon were built there, and it was the central business district and trolley terminal for the area until such things fell from favor after the arrival of the automobile.

Downtown Oregon City is also a natural bottleneck for travel up and down the Willamette Valley. In the early years, all roads led to Oregon City because it was the capital of the region. During the 1850s and '60s, riverboats were the dominant means of transportation in the valley proper. Willamette Falls divided the river in half: the southern, upper portion of the river drained the breadbasket of the Willamette Valley, where the settlers were claiming and farming the clearings left by generations of Indians using fire to control the landscape; and the northern, lower stretch of the river led the last few miles to Portland and the Columbia River, where the produce from the farms of the upper valley was loaded onto ocean-going ships and exchanged for the finished goods headed upstream to supply the growing population. For many years, the portage around the falls was troublesome to passengers and a serious choke point for cargo.

The Oregon Central Railroad reached Oregon City in 1869, though traffic didn't begin in earnest until the line, reorganized as the Oregon and California Railroad, was opened to Eugene in October, 1871. Railroads usually try to follow water-level routes through hills, so the area around Oregon City had several different railroads running through it by the turn of the century, including interurban streetcar lines to Portland and the surrounding communities. The Southern Pacific, searching for a north-south route connecting the cities of the West Coast, bought the Oregon and California Railroad in May, 1887 and expanded into Portland. The same right-of-way through downtown Oregon City is now serving the Union Pacific, which recently purchased the SP. In recent decades, when the automobile made passenger rail service unprofitable, two major arterial roads were routed through Oregon City.

While it is no longer the capital of Oregon and its industrial might is now merely a drop in the bucket of the state's economy, Oregon City is still a vital crossroads and -- even if you were somehow able to convince its citizens to relocate -- cannot withdraw from its periodic battles with the river.

All photographs on this page are courtesy of the Clackamas County Historical Society.