Wilsonville: Boone's Landing on the Willamette

Wilsonville was founded in eighteen forty-six by Alphonso Boone, a grandson of the legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone, who ran a ferry crossing the Willamette River here. The community went by Boones Landing for decades before taking the name Wilsonville in eighteen eighty.

For most of its existence it was a quiet agricultural hamlet. Interstate Five and the freeway era changed everything. Through the nineteen sixties commuters discovered they could live along the Willamette and drive north to Portland or south to Salem. Wilsonville incorporated in nineteen sixty-eight with about one thousand residents. It has since become one of the fastest-growing communities in the Portland metro, a place where Daniel Boone's grandson once ran a ferry and today tens of thousands of people call home.