Durkee, Oregon

Durkee is a small ranching community in the Burnt River canyon of Baker County, that began in the eighteen sixties as a stage stop called Express. The Oregon Short Line railroad came through in the eighteen eighties and the town grew up around the railroad. At its modest peak Durkee had a school, a post office, and a general store.

The post office, still operated into the twenty-first century, one of the last original small-town post offices on this stretch of the old Oregon Trail corridor. Travelers on what became Interstate Eighty-Four pass through the canyon on grades that follow almost exactly the route the emigrant wagons used in the eighteen forties and fifties, making Durkee one of the places where the modern road still follows the original trail.