The so-called gold belt, mostly in Baker and Grant Counties, produced about 60 percent of all gold and silver mined in Oregon.ĭuring the 1880s and 1890s, Baker City’s wood-frame structures gave way to brick and stone buildings, giving the downtown a Victorian appearance. Extending its track by stages over the next twenty years, the railway connected Baker City to Prairie City, forty miles away in Grant County over eighty miles of track. SVRy’s track reached Sumpter in 1896, thirty miles southwest of Baker City, and facilitated a boom in hard-rock mining. They began construction of a narrow gauge railroad, the Sumpter Valley Railway, to haul logs from the ponderosa forests southwest of town. Nibley, and George Stoddard incorporated the Oregon Lumber Company, with a large mill on the south side of Baker City. When the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company and the Oregon Short Line, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, linked up near Huntington on November 12, 1884, Baker City gained access to the markets in Portland and the West Coast and to Omaha and points east. Both Baker City and Baker County were named to honor Edward Dickinson Baker (1811–1861), Oregon’s first senator and the only sitting member of Congress killed in the Civil War.īaker City soon became the center of commerce for Baker County. The city was incorporated in 1874, when the legislature approved the city’s charter. The next year, Baker City was named the new county seat. McCray, Auburn’s first postmaster, moved his post office and variety store to the new town’s Front Street. Pierce platted land that would become the heart of Baker City. That year, several miles to the north, attorney Royal A. By 1865, the gold had played out, and the town’s population had dwindled dramatically. The county seat was Auburn, a mostly tent city that had mushroomed to over four thousand miners during the summer. Schriver-discovered gold in October 1861, a couple of miles south of present-day Baker City.īy September 1862, the Oregon legislature had carved off the eastern edge of Oregon to create Baker County. Yet, as a potential town site at the southern end of fertile Baker Valley, tens of thousands of people heading for “Oregon or Bust” passed through without settlement. That changed when four miners-Henry Griffin, David Littlefield, William Stafford, and G.W. The skyline of Baker City, at an elevation of 3,440, is dominated by two mountain ranges, the Elkhorns on the west and the Wallowas on the east. It is arguably the most picturesque setting of any town on the Oregon Trail.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |