Arlington: Alkali Flats Become a River Town

In the early eighteen seventies, ranchers driving livestock down to the Columbia River set up holding corrals at the mouth of a canyon in what is now Gilliam County, Oregon. By eighteen eighty, Elijah Rhea had built the first permanent house there. The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company punched through a rail line the following year, and the town was platted and named Alkali in eighteen eighty-two.

When the community incorporated on November twentieth, eighteen eighty-five, the business owners decided that name would not attract settlers. Many early residents had roots in the South, so they renamed the place Arlington, either after Arlington, Virginia, home of General Robert E. Lee, or in honor of a local lawyer named Nathan Arlington Cornish.

No one is entirely sure which. Arlington served as the Gilliam County seat until voters moved it to Condon in eighteen ninety, and the town has remained a small Columbia River community ever since.