Sandy, Oregon: Gateway of the Barlow Road
Oregon
Sandy sits at the place where the Oregon Trail's last overland leg brought exhausted emigrants down from the flanks of Mount Hood into the Willamette Valley. In eighteen forty-five, Samuel Barlow blazed a road around the south side of the mountain to give emigrants an alternative to the dangerous Columbia River raft passage. He and Philip Foster built it into a toll road the following year with authorization from the Oregon Provisional Legislature.
The Francis Revenue family arrived in eighteen fifty-three and opened a trading post here on the Barlow Road, serving the thousands still coming through. The settlement was first known as Revenue after them. It took its current name from the Sandy River, which Lewis and Clark had named in eighteen oh five.
The post office opened in eighteen seventy-three, and the village incorporated as a city in nineteen eleven. Today Sandy is the last real town on the highway before the mountain , a junction point as it has always been.
