Saint Louis: First Parish of French Prairie
Near Dundee, Oregon
Saint Louis is one of the quietest corners of the Willamette Valley, but it holds a place at the very beginning of Catholic Oregon. French Prairie, the land around here, was settled from the eighteen twenties onward by French Canadian voyageurs retired from the fur trade, men who married Indigenous women and built farms along the river.
In eighteen forty-five a Jesuit missionary named Father Aloysius Verecuysse built a log church here to serve those scattered families. The parish organized in eighteen forty-seven, named for Louis the Ninth, king of France. It was the third Catholic parish established in what is now the Archdiocese of Portland. The church standing on this site today dates to eighteen eighty, built on the same ground where those fur-trade families first gathered. Almost nothing else remains of the settlement, but the parish kept going.
