Emerick’s Landing — Found

The Tualatin River brushes up against the southern edge of Cornelius in no particular hurry. Fifty river miles still lie between it and the Willamette, and the Tualatin seems entirely unbothered by that fact. From the air, its course through the bottomlands south of town looks less like a river and more like a question — looping back on itself, changing direction without warning, as if it genuinely hasn’t decided where it’s going next.

But one bend in that wandering river holds more history than most people in Cornelius realize. The bend known as the Oxbow, just south of town, is where several threads of this valley’s long story come together in one quiet curve of water and trees.

On the northern bank of the Oxbow stood Emerick’s Landing, the terminus of steamboat navigation on the Tualatin River. In the years before the first railroad arrived in January of 1872, thousands of bushels of wheat were loaded here onto the little sternwheelers that plied the river between Colfax Landing and the farms of the Tualatin Plains. The steamer Onward made the run every Thursday, and it was here that her whistle sounded at journey’s end, and here that Sol Emerick’s son Bill waited with his wagon to carry weary passengers to Free Orchards.

For all practical purposes, Emerick’s Landing was the head of navigation on the Tualatin, though rumors persist of occasional steamer explorations several miles further upriver at favorable stages of the water. One can almost picture Captain Kellogg squinting upriver on a high-water Thursday, wondering how far she’d go.

Within the curve of that same Oxbow, on the land enclosed by the river’s bend, was an Atfalati camp. The Atfalati, the Kalapuyan people whose name gave the Tualatin Valley its name, lived along this river for thousands of years before the first settlers arrived. They knew this bend intimately. They fished it, camped on it, and called it home long before Solomon Emerick built his landing and warehouse on the bank and the steamboats began to come.

The fact that an Atfalati camp and Emerick’s Landing occupied the same bend in the river is not a coincidence. The Atfalati chose that spot for the same reasons the settlers did, the oxbow created a sheltered, accessible place on the water. Thousands of years of human wisdom and a few decades of pioneer commerce, layered on the same curve of the Tualatin.

Old timers used to tell of gold nuggets brought by Native Americans to Emerick’s from a secret mine or cache far back in the Coast Range. It may have been nothing more than an old yarn, but it’s a good one, and the Coast Range keeps its secrets well.

Two other features of this stretch of river deserve mention. The slough that travels under the bridge on Golf Course Road just north of its junction with La Follett Road is called the Bottomless Slough. It is thought that the Tualatin River may have changed its course over time, and the Bottomless Slough may be a leftover remnant of the old river channel, a ghost of the Tualatin as it once was, quietly persisting in the landscape while the main channel moved on.

And continuing south and around the corner on Golf Course Road, you will come to a bridge crossing the Tualatin that was once officially known as Reeves Bridge, after a nearby family. Locally, however, it was known by a better name, Thunder Bridge. The former wooden bridge, floored with hundreds of planks, magnified the sounds of wagons and horses most wonderfully. You could hear it coming before you saw it, and feel it long after you crossed.

The Oxbow is quieter now. The landing is gone. The steamboats are long gone. But the river still bends there, just as it always has, in no particular hurry to be anywhere else.

I know where Emerick’s Landing was. Now you do too.