![]() ![]() The town remained dry until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Reflecting the influence of temperance advocates, Corvallis voters took advantage of the legislature’s local option law in 1905 to become a dry town well in advance of the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. The community’s growing agricultural college, with more than four hundred students in 1900, was becoming ever more important to the local economy.Ĭorvallis grew apace in the new century, its population increasing from 1,527 in 1900 to 4,552 by 1910. When automobiles appeared in the city, local officials began paving streets, and the growing population created a need for new water delivery and sewer systems. They achieved that objective in 1880, when Henry Villard completed a railroad from Portland to Corvallis on the west side of the river.īy the late nineteenth century, Corvallis had become a significant agricultural center, with riverside warehouses brimming with grain and fruit and vegetable harvests awaiting shipment to Portland. With growing surpluses of agricultural products, Corvallis merchants sought a railroad to provide competition with river transportation. In 1885, the State of Oregon seized control of the school’s agricultural college when the church failed to provide sufficient support for the land-grant enterprise.Ĭommerce on the Willamette River was enhanced when the Army Corps of Engineers completed a canal and locks at Willamette Falls in 1873, a project that enabled shippers to pass up and down river without portaging goods around the falls. Proslavery immigrants, who had traveled to the area from Southern and Border States, had established the school. Listed in the 1860 census with a population of 531, Corvallis grew slowly for the rest of the century, numbering 1,819 people in 1900.Ī signal moment for the future of the community occurred in 1868, when the legislature designated Corvallis College, a small sectarian school under the control of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as the state’s agricultural college. Salem eventually won out and became the seat of territorial government in 1856. The town briefly served as the capital of Oregon Territory in 1855 amidst disputes among Oregon's governors and the territorial legislature over the matter. Corvallis had attracted a flood of immigrants seeking Donation Land Claims in the early 1850s, and it continued to grow with expanding wheat production and the establishment of regular steamboat traffic on the Willamette River. ![]() Originally called Marysville and then renamed Corvallis (a Latin compound meaning "heart of the valley") to avoid confusion with Marysville, California, the town was named the seat for Benton County government in 1851 and was incorporated in 1857. Joseph Avery staked the first 640-acre claim to the area in 1845. The first white settlers arrived at the confluence of the Willamette and Marys Rivers in the early 1840s in the wake of devastating malaria outbreaks that had killed approximately 90 percent of the Kalapuya between 18. The longtime home of the Mary’s River band of the Kalapuya, the Native American Longhouse Eena Haws on the Oregon State University campus is a cultural center for the region’s Native people. ![]() Nestled on the west side of the mid- Willamette River, Corvallis is dominated by Oregon State University, the state’s largest university, and is home to the original offices of the international engineering firm CH2M Hill. Located eighty miles from Portland and fifty miles from the Oregon Coast, the city is known for its livability, bicycle-friendly travel, and pleasant retirement community. ![]()
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