Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/34

 24 R. A. BOOTH the construction of the wagon road an immense freight busi- ness was carried on by teams. Schooners, many of them built on the river, brought freight to Scottsburg from San Francisco and other points and carried away such farm and ranch pro- ducts as could be spared for export. The town was named for Levi Scott, who settled there in 1850 and laid out a town. Soon after Scott's arrival, James McTavish opened a store made from the sails of the wrecked Bostonian, a schooner that was sent from Boston and wrecked on the bar at the mouth of the Umpqua River, in attempt to enter, October 1st, 1850. The same year Geo. Snelling built the first permanent building in the town from zinc taken from the cargo of the same vessel. The Bostonian floated into the river to a point opposite the present site of the town of Gardi- ner. Its cargo was mostly saved and was very helpful in filling the new stores and in building the far away western town that flourished for nearly a quarter of a century as a trading metropolis. The Bostonian was sent out by a Boston merchant named Gardiner and was intended as a Pacific Coast trader. Mr. Snelling who had charge of the trading expedition was a nephew of Mr. Gardiner and Captain Coffin, of the schooner, took up as a donation land claim the present town site of Gardiner (so named in honor of the Boston merchant) and sold it to Addison C. Gibbs, who came to Oregon in 1850 and who was elected Governor of Oregon in 1862. Gardiner is 18 miles below Scottsburg and 9 miles from the mouth of the river. The business that centered around Scottsburg attracted many of the early settlers of the country. It was here that Matthew P. Deady, later the learned and just judge, so honored throughout the northwest, early practiced law and held court under the oaks that stood near the Umpqua River the same good man that was named in the charter as a member of the first Board of Trustees of Umpqua Academy, and later the first president of the Board of Regents of the University of Oregon, and whose picture is a benediction to the hundreds who as- semble in Villard Hall.