Lake Oswego - Oregon - History

The area known as Old Town in Lake Oswego is the where the community was born. Old Town was platted in 1851 by Albert Durham, and although he never registered the plat, the townsite eventually grew under the guidance of John C. Trullinger, who purchased Durham's land and sawmill in 1865.

Old Town also grew with the iron industry between 1865 and 1894. The Oregon Iron Company operated from 1865 until it failed in 1876. The company employed about 80 men when the furnace was in full operation, and it built several cottages in Old Town for its workers. In 1877 two investors formed the Oswego Iron Company and sporadically operated the furnace, which produced a total of 18,500 tons of iron until financial troubles closed it in 1881.

In 1882 the company was reorganized as the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. Under Simeon Reed, the company employed approximately 300 men at one time. Business boomed in the 1890, but it was short lived as ships began dumping imported iron on the docks in Portland. The iron had served as ballast and could be sold at a relatively low price. The depression of 1893 brought about the final closure of the plant in 1894.Until the mid-1800s, Lake Oswego was a sleepy assembly of homesteads and farms between the Willamette and Tualatin Rivers in Oregon. A small population of Native Americans--the Clackamas Indians--had occupied the land, but diseases brought by early explorers killed all but a few. Those who remained ceded their territory to the Federal Government in 1855, and moved to the Grand Ronde Reservation in nearby Yamhill County.

The town of "Oswego" was founded in 1847 by Albert Alonzo Durham. He secured the first Donation Land Claim, and named the town after his birthplace in New York. He built the town's first industry--a sawmill on Sucker Creek (now Oswego Creek).

In 1841, iron ore was discovered in the Tualatin Valley, but it was not until 1861 that its existence was an accepted fact. In 1865, the Oregon Iron Company was incorporated. It was the first of three companies that hoped to make Oswego an industrial center, or the "Pittsburg of the West."

The first iron smelter, in modern-day George Rogers Park, went into production in 1867 and continued to operate intermittently under a second corporation, the Oswego Iron Company, until 1881. It was succeeded by the Oregon Iron & Steel Company, which operated at the old plant until 1885. In 1888, its operators built a new smelter on the current Oswego Pointe site. The new smelter had five times the capacity of the old plant.

At its peak, the iron industry employed some 300 men. In 1890, production reached 12,305 tons of pig iron. Oswego was booming. It boasted a growing population, four general stores, a bank, two barber shops, two hotels, three churches, nine saloons, and Davidson's drugstore. An opera house proved to be a profitable investment.

Until 1886, when a narrow gauge railroad between Portland and Oswego was built, Oswego was a remote place. It could be reached only by river boats and narrow dirt roads. The Southern Pacific Railroad acquired the line before the end of the century and widened it to standard gauge. In 1914, it was electrified. The rapid, clean, and quiet trains stimulated residential development in Oswego in the 1920s and 1930s.

With the demise of the iron industry, Oregon Iron & Steel turned its attention to land development. It built a power plant on Oswego Creek from 1905 to 1909, and following the incorporation of the City of Oswego in 1910, sought permission to erect power poles to provide electricity to the community. It sold large tracts of the 24,000 acres it owned to land developers such as Paul Murphy and the Ladd Estate Company, and undertook residential development. In 1926, the first City Hall was built on A Avenue between State and First Streets.

Paul Murphy developed the Oswego Lake Country Club to promote Oswego as a place to "live where you play." By the 1930s, its growth as a year-round living environment was well underway. Murphy built the first water system to serve the west end of the city, and encouraged noted architects to design fine homes during the 1930s and '40s. This gave rise to Oswego's reputation as a community of fine homes for people with taste.

Residential development around the perimeter of Oswego Lake accelerated in the 1940s and '50s. With the annexation of part of Lake Grove to the west in 1960, the name of the city was changed to Lake Oswego.