Never Piss Off The Railroad Rep

Jump: Creswell, OR → Sweet Home, OR – 60 miles
RIGHT out of lot… arrows to I-5 NORTH
Take EXIT #216 – HWY 228 EAST to Sweet Home
Arrows to Lot – Rodeo Grounds
Shows at 2pn/4:30pm

Creswell is Creswell because the railroad snubbed Cloverdale. As a result Cloverdale is now just a name attached to a stretch of road, and Creswell an ugly little town bisected by tracks.

At the hottest point in the afternoon I checked out the local museum, a lovingly arranged collection of junk and relics housed in a one-time Methodist church. “Second oldest building in town,” the curator told me eagerly. He was a tall thin man with a handlebar mustache and what might pass for the air of a distressed aristocrat in these parts. According to the guestbook I was the first person to visit the place in six days.

What could that early Cloverdale town father have done to so piss off the Pacific Railroad’s local rep? Boundary dispute? Or had the railroad rep been a Baptist? This was a question for which the curator – following me from room to room – had no answer. A typed inscription beneath the sepia photograph of another gentleman with a handlebar mustache identified him as William Cresswell, the Postmaster General of the region circa eighteen eighty-something, for whom the then newly founded town – minus the amputation of an s – had been named.