Page 18
February 2014
The Charbonneau Villager
There's Plenty of Miles on the Miley House, Relocated 5 Miles Away
The Miley
family in
front of
their house,
circa 1900.
Jacob is at
the left.
Photos:
Aurora
Colony
Historical
Society.
Looking Back . . .
A Series of Historical Vignettes
on Charbonneau and the Area
MICK SCOTT
The two-story log house
stood guard for 125 years
at the north end of what
now is Old Farm Road
before it was rescued for a
renewed life in a new location.
For much of the last half
of the 19th Century, the
Jacob Miley House overlooked its busy Willamette
River landing where steamers docked with goods and
supplies to be transported
by wagon to the Aurora
Colony five miles away.
The Miley family legacy
in the area dates from
1863 when 19-year-old
William “Cap” Miley and
250 other followers of Dr.
William Keil migrated to
Oregon to settle in what
Miley described as a “little
hamlet in the woods.” The
communal colony, patterned after the one they
left in Bethel, Missouri,
was bordered by the Pudding River to the north and
east, and a tributary, Mill
Creek, to the west.
The old-world log home
at the colony's river landing was built in 1865 by
members of the commune.
Dr. Keil, founder of the
colony, had purchased
the land from George Law
Curry for the purpose of
establishing a shipping
port for his communal
enterprise. Curry's large
home was located one-half
mile to the west, just off
what is now French Prairie
Road.
Jacob Miley, Cap's
brother, migrated to the
communal settlement that
same year from Bethel to
take up residence in the
house. The 23-foot by
37-foot house was built
of stacked,
hand-hewn
logs, covered
on the exterior by horizontal clapboard siding.
Five rooms
were on the
ground floor
with four
rooms on
the second,
reached by a flight of 13
stairs. A small attic was
above. Colonists were
known for their simplicity,
so the Mileys white washed
all the interior walls. The
only accent color was what
became known as “Aurora
Colony blue.” A focal point
in the original house was a
huge walk-in fireplace with
a cooking hearth. It would
be home for Jacob and his
wife Elizabeth, whom he
married in 1863, and their
five children. Elizabeth
died in 1876, but Jacob remarried in 1882 to Maria,
a widow who happened to
be Elizabeth's sister.
Jacob Miley farmed
extensive hop yards that
stretched across part of
present-day Charbonneau.
He eventually bought the
land in 1881, after Dr.
Keil's death, when communal ownership was dissolved and the properties
were divided among colonists.
Jacob died at age 68 in
1907. But the Miley family continued to occupy the
house into the late 1930s.
They finally abandoned
their home after some difficult times that lingered
following the Depression.
The house then stood vacant for decades until the
1970s when it became a
sales and operating office
for Willamette Factors, the
developers of Charbonneau.
The house, now more
than a century old, offered
some challenges. Debbie
Alexander, ofice manager
for Factors at the time,
recalls bats nesting in
the chimney then exiting
through the fireplace into
the office space. “We finally boarded up the fireplace
opening to keep the bats
out and the rest of us in.”
The Miley House was
used as a storage facility
once Factors moved to the
Village Center commercial
building after it was completed in 1979. By the late
1980s, the historic Jacob
Miley House was to be de-
stroyed to make room for
new residential construction.
Historic preservationist
Mike Byrnes was brought
in to salvage the leaded
glass windows. After removing sheet rock from
interior walls along with
some flooring, however,
he saw the original craftsmanship and the historic
nature of the house. This,
he thought, was something
that should be preserved.
He negotiated with Willamette Factors for possession of the house, settled
on a purchase price of
$1 and moved the house
in 1990 by flatbed truck
to Aurora at a cost of
$14,000. Factors, which
was poised to either burn
or demolish the house,
A newly constructed wall fronts the Miley House shortly
before its move to Aurora.
www.charbonneaucountryclub.com