Tag: Cottage Grove

Cottage Grove is a city in Lane County, Oregon, United States. It received its name from its first postmaster, G. C. Pierce, in September 1861. Pierce’s home at the time was in an oak grove. The population was 8,445 at the 2000 census. The 2007 estimate is 9,345 residents.
The first white settlers came to Cottage Grove in 1848 via the Oregon Trail and then the Applegate Trail. Until that time, only the Kalapuya Native Americans occupied the southern territory of the Willamette Valley. The first post office was established in the house of Greenbery C. Pearce, who lived near Creswell, in 1855. 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 southwest 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…