Cottage Grove: Covered Bridges and Hollywood

Cottage Grove, Oregon sits at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, tucked against the Coast Range foothills, and it carries two claims to regional fame. The first is its six covered bridges, including the last remaining covered railroad bridge west of the Mississippi River. The bridges survive because nineteenth-century Oregon builders roofed their timber trusses against the region's relentless rain, and Cottage Grove's rural roads preserved them long after concrete replaced wood elsewhere.

The second claim is cinematic. In nineteen seventy-seven, director John Landis filmed the homecoming parade scene of Animal House along Cottage Grove's Main Street. Stand By Me followed in nineteen eighty-five. But the town's most spectacular screen moment came earlier: in nineteen twenty-six, Buster Keaton staged what film historians consider one of the most expensive and dramatic locomotive crashes ever filmed here, a sequence in his silent comedy The General. The hills above town also hold the ghost mines of Bohemia, where gold was discovered in the eighteen fifties and played out by the nineteen twenties, leaving shanty ruins in the timber.