By Cathy Ingalls, Albany Regional Museum board member
If you thought that the historical sign on the Linn County Courthouse grounds marks a site on the Applegate Trail you would be wrong.
In fact, the trail north from Southern Oregon never came through Albany nor did it pass through Linn County.
Historian Glenn Harrison of Albany told the Democrat-Herald in a 2006 interview that the marker was placed in 1946, the centennial year of the first use of the trail.
At the time Harrison, the president-elect of the Oregon-California Trail Association, said he didn’t know why the marker at Fourth Avenue and Ellsworth Street that reads “Applegate Trail 1846” was still up.
“The trail into the Willamette Valley actually ran west of the Willamette River passing north via the Long Tom watershed through Lane County, then into Benton County and on into Polk County,” said Stephen Dow Beckham, who is a noted authority on Native Americans and the American West.
Beckham, who lives in Lake Oswego, compiled a large volume about the trail in 1996 while researching and then writing information for interpretive kiosks located from the Oregon-California border into Polk County.
Brothers Lindsay, Jesse and Charles Applegate, who traveled to Oregon from Missouri, established the trail as a less dangerous alternative to the western segment of the Oregon Trail that led into Oregon City.
Emigrants who took the Oregon Trail followed the Snake River across southern Idaho and then crossed into Oregon at the present-day town of Vale.
After an ascent of the Blue Mountains, some emigrants placed their belongings and themselves on rafts to float down the treacherous Columbia River. That part of the trip was so dangerous that others opted to walk with their animals along the riverbank.
In 1843, Jesse and Lindsay on their way to the Willamette Valley each lost a son to the river.
In mid-June 1846, 15 valley settlers met at Rickreall Creek near Dallas in Polk County to begin their effort to blaze a new route.
Much of their trail passed through desert and sagebrush. While most of the members chose to rest their horses along Nevada’s Humboldt River, Jesse Applegate continued on to Fort Hall on the Snake River in southeastern Idaho, a stop on the Oregon Trail.
There, Applegate persuaded a number of emigrants to try the new route, much of which was barely marked let alone cleared. The going was tough.
One emigrant, J. Quinn Thornton, for who Thornton Lake in Albany is named, was so angry by the difficulties of the cutoff that he published a number of vicious attacks on Applegate and the conditions of the trail.
Only a modest number of emigrants elected to use the Applegate Trail so it never became as popular as the older Oregon Trail.
In 1992, the National Park Service designated the Applegate Trail a National Historic Trail as part of the longer California Trail.
To celebrate the sesquicentennial in 1996, re-enactments and other festivities were held.
Additional information about the Applegate families can be found in Albany author Ed Loy’s book “Gem of the Willamette Valley, a History of Albany, Oregon.”
The book is on sale at the Albany Regional Museum, which has reopened following a closure because of the virus.
The museum at 136 Lyon St. S is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. The building is closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
To reach the museum, call 541-967-7122 or use info@armuseum.com.