This is near the northern end of Albany’s Columbus Street, which extends a little north of Willamette Avenue.
On the eve of Columbus Day, I rode the bike along parts of Columbus Street in Albany, from the north to the south.
Not that there is anything fascinating to see along Columbus. For the most part it’s an ordinary residential street, except in the south where it turns into high-speed expressway.
Columbus Day is still a federal holiday. So don’t expect any mail today.
In some quarters, Oct. 12 has been turned into “indigenous peoples day.” But not here. It was the Italian explorer, noy anyone else, whose daring voyage in 1492 set in motion the creation of what we now call the western world.
So here’s a look at some of the Albany street signs still paying silent and enduring tribute to Christopher Columbus.
Columbus Street is blocked by barriers on the Water Avenue rail line.
More rail lines, at First Avenue, keep Columbus Street from continuing south.
In South Albany, Columbus picks up again at Grand Prairie.
South Albany High School is in the background, on the east side of Columbus.
As a pedestrian path, Columbus crosses the line used by the Albany & Eastern Railroad.
The Henshaw Farm subdivision added a wide bike path to Columbus north of Ellingson Road.
At Ellingson, Columbus keeps going south toward Highway 34.
When I stopped across from South Albany High School to take a picture, a lady parking her car at the house on the corner looked at me with a question in her eyes.
“Just getting a photo of this street sign,” I told her.
“Oh, is that for Columbus Day?” she said.
Yup. It was. (hh)
“but not here”
Not surprising HH.
And the Kalapuyans?
smh
And what of the “old Ones”, the ones that put the petroglyphs on Cascade Caves thousands of years ago. That is now a ;Linn County Park. There were people here way before the Kalapuyans, the Coos, the Siletz etc
“but not here”. ***
“The cave is a spiritual location where Indigenous peoples, mainly the Molala and Santiam Kalapuya, would gather their spirit power to fish for salmon. Dozens of petroglyphs represent significant events in the lives of the ancestors, including bear-claw marks that indicate that the shelter is a place of Bear power. Bears are good fishers for the salmon that travel up the Willamette River to spawn in the sandy soils of the South Santiam. Nearby, several small river cascades and overhanging rocks in the river canyon create primary places to catch salmon.”
More can be found at….
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/cascadia_cave/
“There were people here way before the Kalapuyans, the Coos, the Siletz etc”
Right Rich. I’m not sure what “way before” means but that’s why we refer to them all as Native Americans.
They’re not immigrants like our families were.
Technically they were immigrants to the area as well. It depends upon how far back you want to go to establish “nativeness”. Just because they didn’t displace a group of people living here when they arrived doesn’t make them “native” and not immigrants.
TECHNICALLY they were NOT immigrants when they came to the Americas:
Immigrant:
From Oxford Languages : a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
From Merriam-Webster: a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence
From: Dictionary.Com: a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.
From Cambridge Dictionary: a person who has come to a different country in order to live there permanently:
The point here is that these “people” came here around 20,000 years ago. There were no “countries” anywhere on the planet. “Humans” did not exist in the “Americas” until humans migrated in from Eurasia after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. The weren’t immigrants, they were the original inhabitants.
It was Europeans, first the Vikings from Nordic countries who did not stay, and the peoples who followed Columbus from Spain/Italy, who had a long history of individual political units who were the first immigrants.
Use Google. Look it up.