Sutherlin: Camas Swale to Apple Country

The ground beneath Sutherlin was once a vast camas swamp, where native people had harvested the bulbs for generations. A pioneer named Fendel Sutherlin drained those wetlands after settling here in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and when his daughter Anne inherited the land, she and her husband Frank Waite hatched a scheme: carve the drained acreage into apple orchard tracts and sell them to Midwesterners looking for a fresh start. Developers built a hotel, donated a depot site to Southern Pacific, and the town of Camas Swale was reborn as Sutherlin when it incorporated in nineteen eleven, named for the pioneer patriarch. In the years after incorporation, orchards, packing plants and a box factory kept fruit moving up and down the valley, according to local histories.