Troutdale started as Sandy in 1840s

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Sep 16, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Photo courtesy of the Troutdale Historical Society

The raw new town of Troutdale, which developed in 1891 and 1892, is seen from Broughton Bluff across the Sandy.

The community we know as Troutdale began at the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia rivers. Now comes the tricky part – it was first known as Sandy, not to be confused with the present city of Sandy.

Before the Barlow Road extended around the south flank of Mount Hood in 1846, the only option for Oregon Trail travelers who wanted to get through the Cascade Mountain Range to the promised land in the Willamette Valley was to float the Columbia River.

Arriving at The Dalles, the travelers sent their drovers and herds westward on rugged overland trails, then engaged boats or rafts to carry themselves, their dismantled wagons and their families and goods downriver. A pioneer with money in his pockets might buy passage all the way to Oregon City, fledgling Portland or Fort Vancouver. But those at the end of their resources wanted to leave the river as quickly as possible. Once through the steep reaches of the Columbia River Gorge, the first likely spot to regain solid ground was at the mouth of the Sandy River. There a speck of a community named Sandy rose to meet the needs of travelers.

From the start of the migration in the 1840s until about 1880, the landing site and cluster of buildings at the Sandy River was a significant crossroad for river travelers.

Researcher Sally Donovan noted in her 1992 history of the Sandy River Delta: “In 1852 George Griswold established a ferry business transporting Willamette Valley-bound settlers from the Cascades on the Columbia River to a point opposite the Sandy River. Griswold then ferried the passengers across the Columbia to the west side of the mouth of the Little Sandy River where a wagon road… connected the Sandy River to the settlements at Portland, Oregon City and the Willamette Valley.”

Donovan added that a landing west of the mouth of the Little Sandy River was called Stott’s Landing, after early land claimant James Stott. In 1852, E.R. Scott established a post office there named Sandy where mail was delivered to the community situated “at the foot of the Cascade Mountains.”

The landing at the Sandy bustled with the traffic of riverboats, ferries and Oregon Trail travelers. Even after the Barlow Road offered a land-based route to immigrants around Mount Hood, some travelers continued to choose the Columbia River, landing at the Sandy to rejoin their teams, rebuild their wagons and set off to find their chunk of the new state.

Though small, the community provided sufficient numbers to produce a love triangle that ended in murder, a tale recounted in a 1926 Outlook story:

OLD TRAGEDY

RECALLED BY

FINDING BONES

While excavating for a roadway to his house from the recently constructed subway on Main Street at Fairview, John Loser unearthed the remains of a human body that have a history almost as old as the settlement and older than the county of Multnomah.

The decaying bones attracted considerable curiosity and much speculation as to whose they had belonged to in life. D.S. Dunbar was the one who finally unraveled the mystery with a history of them.

The bones were the remains of a man named Charles McClellan who was shot and killed by a Mr. Cox, a storekeeper at the mouth of the Sandy River in the year 1853. That was 63 years ago when Clackamas County held jurisdiction over this part of the state, and Multnomah county had not been formed.

The trial of Mr. Cox was held at Oregon City, that being the county seat of Clackamas county, as it yet is. Mr. Dunbar’s father, the late A.C. Dunbar, was one of the jurymen on the trial, and on the first ballot the defendant was acquitted, the jury considering the killing justifiable, the cause being the alienation of the affections of Mr. Cox’s wife.

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