Today’s post takes a different, more personal turn, and was primarily written to share with family. My new all-consuming hobby is digging through the records of Ancestry.com in search of my family genealogy. I find my family stories fascinating and I’ve even found a way to work some travel into it!

Welcome to Umatilla County, Oregon.

My great-great-great grandparents Samuel and Letitia Sproul were born and married in Northern Ireland before they immigrated to the United States. Children were born in Virginia, then Illinois and finally Kansas as they made their way west. In 1862, Samuel volunteered to fight for the Union in the 11th Regiment, Kansas Cavalry and was killed near Red Buttes, Wyoming Territory in the Battle of Platte Bridge Station, on July 26, 1865, in an offensive by the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne Indians against the US army. He was 38 years old and left behind a young wife and six children ranging in age from 2-15 years including my 13-year-old great-great grandmother Elizabeth Sproul. She married and had children. They came West with two brothers and my great-grandmother Edna was born in 1878 in Washington Territory. (Washington didn’t become a state until 1889.)

The Cleghorns are another branch of my family which came to America from Scotland in 1745. After the Civil War, my great-great grandparents James and Emeline Cleghorn left Georgia for Texas. In 1890 they left Texas on the train to Oregon with four of their younger children – my great-grandfather Andrew, John, Minta, and Daisy. Older married children remained in Georgia, Texas, and New Mexico.

Great-grandfather Andrew married great-grandmother Edna and all seven of their children were born in Umatilla County, including my grandmother Bessie who was born in Echo, Oregon.

On the other side of my paternal family, my great-great-great-great grandfather Isaiah Bartley was born in New York. He had a daughter and two sons, Hamilton and Jerome, all born in New York, but the family eventually moved to Michigan. Both of his sons are my great-great-great-grandfathers!

My great-great-great-grandfather Hamilton had a son named George (my great-great grandfather) who had a son named John (my great-grandfather.) John’s mother died when he was six months old so he was raised by his uncle – his father’s brother, also named John.

My great-great-great-grandfather Jerome had a daughter named Mary (my great-great-grandmother) who had a daughter named Miranda (my great-grandmother.)

John and Miranda married. They are my great-grandparents. John, Miranda and their four children left Michigan for Oregon along with Uncle John’s family. Their son Claude, my grandfather, was born in Pendleton – the first of his family to be born in Oregon, two other siblings were born in Oregon as well.

Claude and Bessie married and my father was born in Hermiston, Oregon, but left Umatilla County as a young child. My mother and father settled down in Portland, Oregon where my sister and I were raised.

The first census of the Umatilla County in 1870 counted 2,916 inhabitants. The population has increased steadily with a 2020 census figure of 80,750. Much of the recent growth has come to the Hermiston area.

The historic inhabitants of the area were the indigenous Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Columbia Indians, descendants of peoples who lived in this area for thousands of years.

The Umatilla Indian Reservation was established by the Treaty of Walla Walla in 1855. It became an 800 square mile home for the Umatilla Confederated Tribes and is located immediately southeast of Pendleton. The have over 3,000 enrolled members. 

The gold rush of 1862 brought miners and stock raisers to the mountains and grasslands of Umatilla County. The county expanded after the coming of the railroad in 1881 and the area was open to the development of dry land wheat farming. The fertile land of Umatilla County gives a strongly agricultural base to the county’s economy. Fruit, grain, timber, cattle, and sheep are important agricultural products. Most of my family were wheat ranchers and cattlemen.

Pendleton

Pendleton is the county seat of Umatilla County, Oregon, United States. The population at the time of the 2020 census was 17,107 which includes approximately 1,600 people incarcerated at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution.

According to VisitPendleton, Pendleton is one of the last bastions of America’s Wild West and celebrates the legacies of Native Americans and pioneers alike.

Pendleton’s Attractions:

• Heritage Station: The Umatilla County Historical Society Museum
• Tamastslikt Cultural Institute of the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla Tribes.
• Pendleton’s “Old town” is listed as a Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.
• Center for the Arts in a restored 1916 Carnegie Library
• Pendleton Underground Tours
• Pendleton Woolen Mills founded in 1863, producing vividly colorful woolen blankets and robes for Native Americans made from wool from the many sheep ranches in the region.
• The Pendleton Round-Up, one of the nation’s largest and most well-respected rodeos.

Nolin

I had never heard of Nolin. Nolin is an unincorporated community in Umatilla County, Oregon about 8 miles southeast of Echo, on the Umatilla River.

At one time Nolin had a post office, a store, and a school. Nolin also has a cemetery. An Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (now Union Pacific) railroad line was built through Nolin, crossing the Umatilla River on a steel bridge constructed in 1907.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Echo

Echo is about 1 mile south of Interstate 84 and U.S. Route 395. It is 20 miles west of Pendleton and 8 miles south of Hermiston.

The original Oregon Trail Columbia Plateau Route opened in 1847, passing directly through Echo, where it crossed the Umatilla River. Frequently pioneers would camp at the Lower Crossing Camp at Echo. The Upper Crossing Camp was located where Pendleton stands today.

In the 1860s, settlers began moving into the area, and built a ferry crossing the Umatilla River at Echo.

The city of Echo is named after Echo Koontz, daughter of Cynthia and J. H. Koontz. Agriculture was the first draw, with alfalfa and corn being the main crops. A town was platted by 1880, and the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company built a railroad through Echo by 1883, which made the town a shipping point for wool, cattle and sheep during the early 1900s. Echo was incorporated in 1904.

Wikipedia

Echo Cemetery is the final resting place of several of my ancestors including my great-great grandparents James and Emeline.

Stanfield

Stanfield covers an area of 1.73 square miles. It’s population in 2020 was 2,145.

Hermiston

Hermiston is the largest city in Eastern Oregon with a population of about 20,000. Hermiston sits near the junction of I-82 and I-84, and is 7 miles south of the Columbia River, Lake Wallula, and the McNary Dam. The Hermiston area has become a hub for logistics (Wal-Mart has a distribution center here) and Amazon has several data centers under construction due to low local power costs.

On July 10, 1907 the town of Hermiston was incorporated. The original train station was called Maxwell, but Colonel J. F. McNaught, an early settler in the region, later named it Hermiston, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, a hamlet near Edinburgh, Scotland.

Much agricultural acreage is in potato production due to several large frozen potato processing plants in the area. The city is also famous for Hermiston watermelons.

This was a fun overnight trip for us from Spokane, Washington. I felt a connection to the area that is hard to explain. It makes me want to travel and check out more of my ancestral roots.

My maternal grandparents come from Michigan, Quebec, Finland and Nebraska...