Albany's First Frame House

In eighteen forty-seven, brothers Thomas and Walter Monteith left Ohio and walked the Oregon Trail by ox team. When they arrived in the Willamette Valley, they paid four hundred dollars for three hundred twenty acres along the river, and in eighteen forty-nine they raised Albany's first sawed-lumber frame house. Sawn boards were scarce in early Oregon, where most settlers made do with logs, so the house marked a turning point.

The brothers platted the town around it, named for their home county back east. Albany grew into a rail hub and manufacturing center. A decade later, in eighteen fifty-seven, a group of antislavery Oregonians gathered right here in the Monteith parlor and founded the Oregon Republican Party, months before Oregon entered the Union.

The house still stands on Second Avenue and opens for tours today, preserved today as a museum of pioneer life.