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In 1862, five men
from South Carolina were on their way to the
California
gold fields. Along the way, Hugh Asbury, John Reel, Fletch
Henderson, Bill Flanagan and Dick Johnson, camped near a place called
Cracker Creek.
While they were
there, they decided to do a little gold panning along the creek and
were excited when bits of the precious yellow metal appeared in their
pans. The next thing you know, they weren’t on their way to
California
anymore, deciding to settle right where they were. Soon they
built a small primitive cabin between McCully and Cracker Creeks and
named it Fort
Sumpter
after South Carolina Fort Sumter, of Civil War fame. Oops, they didn’t
realize there wasn’t a “P” in the word “Sumter.” In any case,
the name stuck, though somewhere along the line, the word “Fort” was
dropped from the town’s name. Today, remnants of that first
cabin can still be seen about a half mile above
Sumpter
on the Granite Road.
Growing slowly due to
its remote location, the first post office was not established until
1874. It was hard to get to
Sumpter
in those days, as the wagon road that wound over the hills to Baker
City was nearly 30 miles away. However, that very same wagon
road became the early stage route that connected many of the mining
towns of the area.
Around 1895,
Sumpter
began to grow as new technology made it easier to extract the gold. Just two years later the
Sumpter
Valley Railway extended its track to the settlement and the town grew
to some 300 people. It was then, that the boom really began and
miners began to arrive in numbers.
By the turn of the
century, several brick buildings were built and streets were paved
with planks. The new railway was delivering as much as six
carloads of mining equipment daily and there were seven stage lines
running. The town soon earned the nickname, The Queen City, as
it became the hub for several surrounding mining camps.
By the turn of the century, almost nine
million dollars in gold had been taken from the area's 35 mines. The
town, which had grown phenomenally, sported seven hotels, sixteen
saloons, three newspapers, two churches, an opera house, two banks, a
red light district, and dozens of other businesses. A couple of
years later when the census was tallied, it found over 3,500
registered voters which did not include women, children or Chinese
immigrants.
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