Speaker: Clark Colahan
Location: Online
Cost: Free
How to Join: The webinar will be presented on Zoom video; please register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hTnDVG5mRniSpGgSRc02Lw
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Synopsis: The lively history of the Milton-Freewater and Weston area from 1870-1890, and the economic energy that it brought to the development of Walla Walla, faded away for many decades. Those ghosts have now sprung back to life, thanks to Fort Walla Walla Museum’s Living History company, and Walla Walla 2020, which preserve and recover the area’s remarkable past. One part of it, both spectacular but for years on the verge of falling into oblivion, is the iron horse that first snorted and steamed a path south from Whitman Mission into Oregon’s Umatilla County: Dorsey Baker’s Walla Walla and Columbia River Railroad. Just four years after the WW&CRR linked the Washington half of this valley and hills to the Columbia River and the outside world, the same infrastructure builder linked the two halves together, to nearly everyone’s mutual benefit.
The people who made it all happen include Dorsey Baker, with the forgotten story of what really motivated him to build first his famous “raw-hide railroad” and then his Blue Mountain extension; stock market wizard and railroad magnate Henri Villard, who bought out Baker and linked this area in his transcontinental transportation network; Dr. Nelson Blalock, who found time from delivering thousands of babies to pioneer dryland wheat farming and employ hundreds of local people in creating flumes cascading down the mountain named for him; John Boyer, who foresaw the need to jumpstart investment in infrastructure (irrigation), and Ed Burlingame, who introduced the new technology that brought it to reality; and Jack Cartwright, the English immigrant who drove and fired the locomotives.
In this talk, Clark Colahan relives his recent adventure of stumbling upon the lost map of the Blue Mountain Railroad. Colahan’s friend and neighbor Randy Reese, keeper of the historic hilltop cemetery in Milton Freewater, took up the map and soon found narrow-gauge spikes and other remains of the road right along the forgotten route. The story of the road is elaborated upon with oral histories from remaining farmers and research from various railroad museums. The culmination of this work can be found in Colahan’s 2019 book, Walla Walla’s Blue Mountain Railroad in 1879.
Presentation begins at 5 pm via Zoom, followed by a live Q&A session.