Frenchy Latourell and His Columbia River Home

The tiny community on this spot bears the name of Joseph Latourell, a French-born immigrant everyone called Frenchy, who arrived in Oregon in the eighteen fifties and decided the Columbia River Gorge was as good a place as any to put down roots. He married Grace Ough and built a log cabin near the river. In the years that followed, Frenchy ran a general store, served as postmaster, operated a fish wheel, and worked as a boatman on the Columbia.

The family was known for making music. By the eighteen eighties a small lumber community had grown up around his homestead. It declined in the twentieth century and is today essentially a ghost settlement, remembered mainly for the spectacular two-hundred-forty-nine-foot waterfall that carries his name.