Frontier Life

Frontier Life. Early Settlers. After lengthy journeys across inhospitable deserts and mountains in the early 1800s, weary travelers arrived in the Willamette Basin. Lane County's first Euro-American settler, Elijah Bristow, arrived in June of 1846, making his 640-acre claim at Pleasant Hill. Others followed, gradually pushing up the Middle Fork of the Willamette River and into the larger side valleys - even though easily-farmed land was scarce above the site of present-day Lowell. Elijah and many of the early settlers were subsistence farmers and ranchers who grew vegetables, tended apple and nut orchards, and raised livestock. In the 1880s about 650 people lived between Lowell and Oakridge., The eight miles of river bottomlands between Lowell and Oakridge are now deep beneath the waters of Lookout Point Reservoir. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the region was known as "Rush Island," and boasted three towns - Carter, Landax (later called Signal), and Reserve - that were home to an assortment of subsistence farmers, squatters, and workers from logging and railroad camps., Until the 1950s, the town of Reserve was Forest Service headquarters for the West Boundary Ranger District., Between the mid-1870s and 1904, hops were one of the most important Upper Willamette Valley cash crops. In the 1890s, there were six hop yards, like this one, between Eula (now covered by the Lookout Point Reservoir) and Lowell.