North Powder: Ice House of the Railroad Era

North Powder sits in the Powder River Valley at the foot of the Elkhorn Range, a place that served as an Oregon Trail campsite as early as eighteen sixty-two, when James DeMoss established a stage station here for the rush of miners heading to eastern Oregon gold fields. The town was platted in eighteen eighty-five when the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company laid tracks through the valley. What gave North Powder its edge in the railroad age was an icehouse.

The facility supplied refrigerator cars for the Pacific Fruit Express, keeping fruit from the Columbia Basin cold all the way to market. When the icehouse burned in the nineteen thirties, the town's economic anchor was gone. Today about five hundred people live in North Powder, but the valley views and the old rail corridor remain.