Hubbard: A Town Built on a Railroad Deal
Near Dundee, Oregon
Hubbard exists because of a land offer made at exactly the right moment. When the Oregon-California Railroad was planning its route through the Willamette Valley in the eighteen seventies, an early settler named Charles Hubbard made the railroad an offer: he would donate the right of way and every other block of a new townsite if they would locate a depot on his land. The railroad accepted. The tracks were laid, and the station took the name of the man who gave it a home.
The first train stopped in Hubbard in eighteen seventy. The town incorporated in eighteen ninety-one. By nineteen ten the population had reached about two hundred eighty, sustained by wheat and grain shipments north. It is a classic Willamette Valley railroad town, founded on a handshake between a farmer and a railroad surveyor.
