Jason Lee and the Mission That Became a City

The building you are near right now sits on the ground where Salem began. In eighteen thirty-four, a Methodist missionary named Jason Lee arrived in the Willamette Valley and built a small mission station on the lowlands along the river. When he returned in eighteen forty after a fundraising trip east, he brought fifty additional volunteers, and the mission relocated south to the site that would become Salem. By eighteen forty-one, missionaries had built a granary, a sawmill, a gristmill, and the first dwelling house in what they called their Central Mission Station.

The house they built first still stands. It was moved to the Willamette Heritage Center on Mill Street in nineteen sixty-five, and historians consider it the oldest surviving wood-frame structure in the Pacific Northwest.

Lee's ambitions extended well beyond religious conversion. He wanted to build institutions that would anchor American settlement in the Oregon Country. In eighteen forty-two, the mission established the Oregon Institute, a school that would within a decade become Willamette University, the oldest college west of the Rocky Mountains. The institute hosted the first session of the provisional territorial legislature before a permanent government building existed.

The Wolf Meetings of eighteen forty-two and eighteen forty-three, held partly in Salem, were gatherings of settlers to discuss livestock protection, but they quickly expanded into something more consequential: a debate about whether to form a self-governing provisional government. That debate culminated at Champoeg, eighteen miles to the north, on May second, eighteen forty-three, when a vote of fifty-two to fifty established the first organized American government on the Pacific Coast.

Jason Lee did not survive to see Oregon statehood. He was recalled to the East by Methodist officials in eighteen forty-four and died in Quebec in eighteen forty-five at forty-one years old. What he built here outlasted him by generations.