What is the history of Cottage Grove, Oregon?

The city of Cottage Grove incorporated in February, 1887, more than thirty years after the first settlers arrived to what is now Dorena Reservoir. The small town developed as the center of a struggling agricultural community, a place where people often settled because better lands in the northern valley had been taken. Most newcomers hailed from the Midwest. While they found winters in the valley mild, settlers had to acclimate to months of rainy weather and annual floods.

Settlers supplemented subsistence agriculture with livestock and dairies but more importantly with logging and mining. Some of the earliest logging activity in Lane County occurred on the Upper Coast Fork (now the location of Cottage Grove Dam) where settler William Payne built the area's first mill in 1867. By the 1890s, loggers used this Willamette River tributary to transport logs to the new mills that lined the shores.

Further north, along the Row River, mining became a significant economic activity after gold was discovered in the Cascade Range in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1902, 2,000 mining claims existed in the Cascades near Cottage Grove. The Row River Valley provided the easiest access to the Bohemia mining area and eventually became the site for the area's first railroad, built in 1899. The railroad ended Cottage Grove's isolation and incorporated the city into western Oregon's transportation corridor. It also launched a logging boom that would not subside until the 1980s.

As was common in Oregon pioneer days, post offices for locations would move with each new postmaster, and it wasn't until the later 1860s that the Cottage Grove post office arrived at its final location, in the extreme south west of present-day Cottage Grove. When the Southern Pacific Railroad built their line through the area, they built their station more than half a mile to the northeast of the post office, starting a bitter neighborhood disagreement. Since the inhabitants near the post office would not allow it to be moved next to the railroad station, a post office was established near the station, called Lemati, after the Chinook word lemiti for mountain. In 1887 Cottage Grove was incorporated as a city, but the eastern community still used the placename Lemati intermittently until both communities were merged in 1898.

In 1926 the spectacular locomotive crash from Buster Keaton's The General was filmed in the countryside, and the wrecked train became a minor tourist attraction until it was dismantled for scrap during World War II. Parts of the movie National Lampoon's Animal HouseAnimal House were filmed in Cottage Grove, and the 25th anniversary of the movie's release was celebrated August 30, 2003 by the citizens with a toga party on Main Street. Main Street is where the climactic parade sequence from the movie was filmed. Portions of the movie Stand By Me were filmed along the railroad tracks east of Cottage Grove.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottage_Grove%2C_Oregon