Ninth Coolest Town In the U.S.A.

Jump: Gates, OR → Silverton, OR, Robert Frost School: 45 miles
RIGHT out of the lot…arrows back to HWY 22 WEST
At Sublimity, arrows to Cascade HWY North to Silverton
Arrows to the lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

Gates is a dot in the Santiam Canyon, a pass that slashes through the central Cascades with its endless dank forests of Douglas fir. Blink: you’ll be glad you missed it. Rained the whole time we were there. Big audience though. During intermission I watched the manly men standing in clusters, puffing cigarettes, casting furtive glances at the mill which you could just see from the grounds of the old school where we circus gypsies were camped. You can tell they’re manly men because they wear their baseball caps bill forward.

Today’s jump – the oh-so-adorable town of Silverton – lay at the end of a rapturously beautiful country road that wrapped itself around the gently rolling hills, cutting through farms and vineyards.

Silverton came in #9 in Budget Travel’s 2009 Coolest Small Town in America contest! A penny buys you 20 minutes of parking time in the historic downtown which consists of three winebars, six coffee houses, five tschotscke emporiums and a tavern where you can shoot pool and play Texas Hold ‘Em till two in the morning. Was not always thus, of course. Founded in the early 1850’s, Silverton was one of the California Gold Rush’s early breadbaskets. A flourmill once stood on the banks of Silver Creek in addition to the ubiquitous timber mill. Outstripped the now defunct town of Milford (two miles up Silver Creek) because the developer was smart enough to market it as a happily-ever-after to the gold miners after they burned out.

I find the morphologies of little cities like this endlessly fascinating, exercises in psycho-economics. Commercial buildings are relatively large capital investments; absent natural disaster, they tend to stand until something more valuable replaces them. Judging from the architecture of its central business district then, Silverton reached the height of its prosperity in the early 1920’s. Today it exists mostly as a charming suburb of Salem, depending upon the kindness of tourists for the occasional handout.