Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/488

350 the region of Belmont County and Wheeling, Virginia, he made a great effort to get up a colony to come out to California. In fact, he projected his scheme on a scale large enough to land a ship load of resolute men on the coast of California, capture the country and raise the American flag and organize an American state ten years before Fremont at the head of the United States exploring expedition raised the American flag at Monterey in 1846. Lease did not succeed in organizing a party to go to California, but went there alone in 1835, by the way of New Orleans, Vera Cruz and across Mexico.

But to "return to our mutton;" sheep did so well in Oregon that the tables were turned by 185 1, and Oregonians were driving mutton sheep back to California to sell to the miners for food.

But the rapid increase of sheep and the scarcity of woolen fabrics for clothing, excited interest in a proposition to build a woolen mill and manufacture Oregon wool into the needed cloth and blankets.

Joseph Watt did not put in two hundred and forty long weary, nerve racking days in driving three hundred sheep from Ohio to Oregon without getting a few useful ideas in his head. One of these thoughts was the building of a mill to manufacture wool. The probability is, that while Watt drove the sheep, the ambition to build a woolen mill drove Watt. And so by the time he got his sheep safely into the Willamette valley and comfortably provided for on his beautiful farm at Amity, he had his mill all ready to run except building the house and putting in the machinery. In fact he brought some of the machinery with him; for he brought along a wool carding machine, the first brought to Oregon, and which made into rolls the fleece of his sheep the next spring, while the pioneer women got out their old wheels, or made new ones, and spun the first wool off Watt's sheep.

But to return to the woolen mill. When Joe Watt undertook a job he was not a "quitter." He got his stock subscription paper ready, and by the end of 1853 ^e had got the money, the machinery, the factory building, and was making woolen cloth at Salem in the first woolen mill on the Pacific coast called the "Willamette Woolen Mill." The mill was operated by water power brought down from Santiam river; worked up four hundred thousand pounds of wool annually, and paid out $100,000 annually for wages to the operatives who were mostly Salem girls. The mill prospered for many years; and after twenty-three years successful operation was unfortunately destroyed by fire.

Other mills have been put in operation in the state in addition to the Watt mill. One at Brownsville, Linn County, has been operated successfully for many years, and has a large store in Portland to sell its goods and clothing. A larger mill than either the Salem or Brownsville mills was erected at Oregon City in 1865; and although once burned down, was speedily rebuilt and has made fortunes for its owners, who are citizens of Portland. Its employees number about four hundred.

But the largest and most successful enterprise of the kind is the Portland Woolen Mills, promoted by Mr. W. P. Olds of Olds, Wortman and King, and having its new and extensive factory at St. Johns, where between four and five hundred workers are steadily employed. The city of Portland is the center of this woolen manufactures business, and is promoting and developing a larger manufacturing interest in woolen goods and clothing than all the rest of the Pacific coast combined.

The last state census shows one and a half million head of sheep in the state, and the probability that there were several hundred thousand more scattered around through the sage brush and browsing the bunch grass on inaccessible mountain sides that were not reported. The annual wool clip in Oregon is now about twenty million pounds a year, worth twenty cents a pound as it comes off