Abraham Lincoln
It seems appropriate that today, the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, that the topic of our Community Historian Class will be “Destination: Pacific County.” Jim Sayce will be our speaker and he will give us a look at “transportation and routes of travel and their implications in the settlement and economy of the county.” An important link in that transportation chain was the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
That was four years after Lincoln’s assassination, but getting the railroad across the continent had been begun by the stroke of Lincoln’s pen in 1862 when he created the Pacific Railway Act. Not that a transcontinental railroad was a new idea; it had been talked about for more than a decade. But it took the commitment of the newly elected President, once a railroad lawyer, to get things underway.
Settlement of Pacific County began long before the railroad arrived, of course. Water and wagon routes were first, as I’m sure Jim will talk about today. My own great-grandfather, R. H. Espy, came to Oregon Territory from Pennsylvania in 1852, leaving April 21, 1852 and arriving in the Columbia River Valley on August 27, 1852. His journey was mostly on foot, though he did have a canvas-covered Conestoga wagon. He also started out with a rooster, four hens, two dogs, six cows, and two yoke of oxen.
Commemorating the Transcontinental Railroad’s Completion
By the following Spring when Espy arrived in Pacific County there were already a handful of settlers here. Most had come, not overland, but by water, often from the East Coast and thence “Around the Horn” and up to the California Gold Fields and, eventually, northward to oyster-rich Shoalwater Bay.
The area was remote and although a trade route (known as the Shoalwater Bay Trade, 1850 to 1869) for shipping oysters and importing needed goods was set up immediately, settlement remained sparse for several decades. Until the railroad came in. Then, of course, followed the roads and the ferries and, later, the bridges. It took a long time. We are not densely populated (thank goodness!) even now.
These days, the answer to “How did you get here” is invariably “By car.” It would have been different a century ago and different, still, 150 years ago. Hooray for President Lincoln! And, of course, hooray for a whole host of others. But today… Hooray for Lincoln!
Lincoln and Washington have always held a special spot in my heart, not just because of all they accomplished, but because they, too, are February birthday people. As are you, also, yes? In our current way of celebrating President’s Day, they sometimes get lost. People don’t remember, or were never aware of, the original days on which we used to celebrate these two presidents.