Albany, Oregon: The Victorian Survivor

Albany, Oregon sits where the Calapooia River meets the Willamette, and when you drive through its older neighborhoods you are moving through one of the best-preserved collections of Victorian architecture anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. More than seven hundred historic buildings survive here, in three districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Monteith District, the Hackleman District, and the Downtown Commercial core.

The town was born when brothers Walter and Thomas Monteith of New York, who arrived in eighteen forty-seven, purchased a three-hundred-twenty-acre land claim for four hundred dollars, platted out a sixty-acre townsite, and named it after their home state's capital. Their frame house, completed in eighteen forty-nine, was considered the finest residence in all of Oregon at the time. Within a year they had opened a general store, the commercial seed of what would become a thriving Willamette Valley market town.

But Albany carries a Civil War shadow that shaped its very streets. The Monteith District on the west side drew Republican merchants and professionals loyal to the Union. The Hackleman District on the east drew settlers who leaned Southern. The two communities were, as local historians put it, literally and politically on opposite sides of the fence. After the war, neither side left. Both stayed and built, which is precisely why Albany now holds so many houses: the community never collapsed or burned or cleared itself away the way boom towns did. It simply kept accumulating.

The result is a neighborhood where Queen Anne Victorians stand alongside Italianate storefronts, Craftsman bungalows neighbor Gothic Revival cottages, and covered bridges cross nearby creeks. Linn County earned the nickname Covered Bridge Capital of Oregon partly because of Albany's cluster of eight historic spans. They were built in the nineteen thirties when local timber was plentiful and steel was expensive, roofed over to protect the timber from Oregon's relentless rain.

Albany also holds the unusual distinction of having been seriously proposed as the state capital, twice, before Salem locked in its claim. The town's survivors include the Monteith House itself, the family's original eighteen forty-nine frame residence, still standing on Main Street and open as a museum.