Road Trip! Oregon! Vernonia! Nehalem River! Roy! Idiotville!



If you can't figure out what this is you need help.

Well another road trip for the day!   Today (Actually a few days ago - been sick - and started this but just finished it today) I went to the Vernonia Pioneer Museum to see what I could find on a stagecoach route through the region.  Why?  My family owns property where the route used to run by and I'd be interested to go scope it out and see what I can find.

Today? Not a whole lot as it turns out.  Not much at all except there was one and the trip from Cornelius to Vernonia by stagecoach took 11 hours and 30 minutes. Its 27 miles by today's highway so it would have been approximately a 4mph journey at the MOST back then at any given point.  The only reason I found it out was someone in re-furbishing a home in downtown Vernonia found a newspaper in the walls from 1887 that actually on the front page had the stage coach route on it. Notice there is a town called "Idiotville" on the map.  Yes, its a real town but a ghost town.  A jumping off point for loggers in the forest where it was so isolated, "only an idiot would go out there."

Cobalt Blue Bottle Collection at the museum.  Every

pioneer museum needs a cobalt blue bottle display!

Vernonia's such an isolated community - you wouldn't even know it was there or how to get to it, or to Jewell or Mist or the Nehalem River unless there was the huge sign on the side of 26 pointing you that way.  There's really not much there.  In one of the floods back in 1996, the town is so isolated, it was actually forgotten while they were underwater. Literally - forgotten.  Good thing Bush wasn't president and it wasn't a black community.  Just a bunch of white loggers - we all know they deserve to be flooded out of their trailers and pickup trucks because they are so rich so it serves them right for being white. Their population wasn't even 2,000 then.  If God was truly just he would smite them with a 747 crashed into the side of the high school to punish them for their evil in cutting down trees while they should be converting to sharia jihadi militant Islam Oh, here's a link to a full episode of Ax Men - one of the stars of the show owns a logging company out of there, Mike Pihl - who everybody knows in town and even came up in the subject of talking with the ladies at the Museum.  Vernonia=loggers=logging.

Anyways, the Pioneer Museum is the old Mill Office of Oregon America Logging Company.  I was going to ask if I could take my metal detector to the grounds around the mill office but don't really want to deal with the Vernonia Thug Mafia Drug Dealer Police Department blowing a fuse over someone doing something without specifically asking them. (They have a reputation for dishonesty and corruption in the city - is it true?  I talked with a state trooper once who made a comment to the same effect while we chatted as he passed through Vernonia - so - I guess there's something to it - at any rate they do NOT have a reputation for being honest and as an ex-cop....well...I would rather not tangle with a corrupt PD). 

Nehalem River looking south under Bridge Street.  The salmon were

thrashing under the bridge on their way towards me.

So we finally headed down to the river and I did some metal detecting IN the river itself and just found the usual pennies.  However, the salmon are spawning and I saw something I've never seen before in my life: Steelhead Salmon, exhausted from their trip from the Pacific working their way up river in water that's almost too shallow for them.  They were HUGE!  Well over 3 feet and approaching four in many instances.  But they were thrashing through the shallows.  I had 90% of a mind to jump in and tackle one except for the Vernonia thug gang-rape drug-dealing police department was not something I cared to deal with that day as they have a reputation for enforcing rules they make up on the spot or that nobody's heard of - and more than that - I hate getting my shoes wet and I don't even like eating fish.  But it'd have been a scream to catch one!

Nehalem River looking north, the Salmon were thrashing in the
shallows there too on the right side just before the stillwater.

Another Magic Carpet Made of Steel from the Oregon American Logging Company

Formerly the brig of the USS Oregon (BB-3) - that for a time ended up as Vernonia's Jail.  Nobody knows how it got there but that's what it was.  Now it's on display in Vernonia.  Yet another scattered piece of Battleship Oregon around the state.

Interior view of the big.

At any rate, we had a good time.  A search of downtown located an old logging train, another Magic Carpet Made of Steel.

Strangely the brig off Battleship Oregon was in the park near the train  I hadn't thought much of it until I was reading the signs in the park tellng me what it was. Since I walked a beat in a brig and spent some time around them, I thought it'd be neat to put a picture of an old one from the 1800's up.

But the day couldn't start without Rachel getting a toy electric motor caught in her hair.

Rachel, demonstrating the fashionability of a toy motor in here hair

After all this we went to Mariolino's in downtown Vernonia for the two-for-one special and had four hamburgers for $2.00.   They really are good.

Finally, we ended up in Roy, Oregon, where my family lived back before the depression - German Immigrants and farmers.  There's not a lot to see there, small town....okay....exceptionally small town.  Makes Vernonia look huge.  Wide spot in the road.  But here's a few photos from playing around on the railroad tracks where the station used to be way-back when. Notice the grey skies.....yes....it's started again.  Rainy season....until next July pretty much.