In the winter of 2020, my wife mentioned that one of the big buildings on Flax Plant Road was being torn down. I had no particular knowledge of the buildings there or of the flax industry, but I assumed that something that had occupied that much space for that many decades must have been important…
On November 1, 2017, a siren that had stood in Cornelius for sixty-four years was taken down. For more than six decades it had called volunteer firefighters from across the community to battle blazes on the Tualatin Plains. It has been in storage ever since. Most people who heard that siren over the years had…
The house at the corner of South 10th Avenue and South Cherry Street in Cornelius was built in 1876. It was the home of John H. and Nancy Cornelius and their family, and it is still standing today. That middle initial matters. The H stands for Henry, and it is worth noting because John H….
One of my favorite things is finding an old photograph I have never seen before. This one is especially exciting because one of the buildings in it is still standing today, which is not often the case in Cornelius. Early buildings here were mostly wood frame and, given the climate, they tended to have a…
Not every story begins with a dramatic discovery or a remarkable revelation. Sometimes it begins with a laugh. While browsing through the Washington County Independent from 1874, I came across this item: “Lost. Frank O’Connor went to Cornelius and stayed till after dark. He started home but got lost. He says his horse left the…
For fifteen years I lived near Long Road. I never gave it much thought, other than perhaps noting that it is not all that long of a road. About a year ago, while researching another story, I stumbled upon an old photograph of one of Les Long’s airplanes. Curious, I spent more hours than I…
As far as I know, there is only one monument in the Cornelius Methodist Cemetery that was paid for by an act of the United States Congress. On April 19, 1928, Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York introduced H.R. 13172: “That the sum of $1,000 is hereby authorized for the purpose of erecting a…
When the first settlers put down roots on the Tualatin Plains, they needed three things before a community could truly call itself a community: a school, a church, and a place to bury their dead. Cornelius got all three in short order. And the stories behind each of them are considerably more remarkable than most…
The Gold Standard — Lester Mooberry on Life in Early Cornelius When it comes to local historians, Lester Mooberry sets the standard. Digging up information on big events is relatively straightforward — newspapers and books documented those well enough. But the details of normal daily life are far more elusive, and those details are what…
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…