Monticello Convention State Parks Heritage Site – state park quest #26

Browsing the state parks map, we noticed the intriguingly named Monticello Convention Site in the middle of Longview, a city at the junction of the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers. On the way to Portland one day, we stopped to investigate.  

Leafy neighborhoods radiate out from R. A Long Park, the center of the city built in the early 1920s to house workers for the Long-Bell Lumber Company. The Monticello Convention State Park Heritage Site is a stone’s throw from the park. Three wood panels explain the site’s significance as the 1852 meeting place for a group of settlers who petitioned Congress to carve a new territory from the gigantic Oregon Territory. It was the second such convention. The first, at Cowlitz Landing about 20 miles north, took place in 1851, and its 26 attendees also sent a petition to Congress.

These petitions were successful. Congress created Washington Territory in March 1853, laying the framework for what would become Washington state 36 years later. All good. But there’s more to the Monticello story than the panels reveal. It was the earlier Cowlitz Convention, not the Monticello Convention, that prompted Congress to create Washington Territory. So depending on your interpretation, the Monticello Convention is either a footnote or an exclamation point in Washington’s territorial history.

Oregon Territory is too big

In 1848, Congress created the Oregon Territory, which included all of present-day Washington and Oregon and parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Although most settlers stayed south of the Columbia River, a few headed north, scattering around Puget Sound country, the coast, and east of the Cascades. Within five years, perhaps 4000 Euro-Americans lived north of the Columbia, among the tens of thousands of indigenous peoples who have been here for millennia. That was a fraction of the number in present-day Oregon, and the disparity led to hard feelings.

On July 4, 1851, a settler named John Chapman gave an Independence Day speech in Olympia urging a new territory north of the Columbia River. “Northern Oregon” lacked fair representation in the territorial capital, Salem, which was at least two days’ travel away. Northerners, especially those in the south Puget Sound area, were also unhappy with the continued presence of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A British company that dominated trade in the region, some perceived the HBC as controlling prime agricultural land to the detriment of American newcomers. Fired up, settlers resolved to hold a convention at Cowlitz Landing the following month and petition to Congress for a new Columbia Territory.

The Cowlitz Convention 

The Cowlitz Convention was duly held on August 29, 1851, at Cowlitz Landing on the river of the same name. It was an auspicious spot, an important transportation hub connecting the water highways of the Columbia and Cowlitz rivers to Puget Sound via an ancient pathway. The Cowlitz Trail, roughly today’s Highway 99, runs right past the Jackson Court House State Park Heritage Site. It would have taken only a few hours for convention delegate John Jackson to walk or ride the trail eight miles to the landing.

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Twenty-six white men attended the Cowlitz Convention, signing a memorial to Congress requesting a new territory. In September, the territory’s two newspapers, the Weekly Oregonian and Oregon Spectator, published the memorial in full. Sometime that fall, territorial delegate Joseph Lane introduced the memorial to Congress and it was referred to the Committee on Territories in late December. Oddly, it’s not reprinted in the Congressional Globe (the predecessor of the Congressional Record), which that year had transitioned from printing summaries of congressional debates to printing essentially verbatim transcripts. And that was it from Washington City (as Washington, DC, was then called) for the next seven months.

An Independence Day rinse and repeat

In Olympia on July 4, 1852, lawyer Daniel R. Bigelow speechified for a new territory and announced another meeting to be held that fall: the Monticello Convention. Throughout the summer, groups of settlers in Northern Oregon met to elect delegates.

Significantly, in September, The Columbian newspaper published its first issue in Olympia. Unbeknownst to readers, the paper was bankrolled by the owners of the Weekly Oregonian, who recognized that carving out a new territory improved southern Oregon’s chances for statehood. The newspaper printed its location as “Olympia, on Puget’s Sound” as opposed to “Olympia, Oregon Territory.” Its very name was designed to push its agenda, as the favored name for the new territory was Columbia. Every issue included coverage of the effort to gain a separate Columbia Territory. 

In mid-October, having introduced the Cowlitz Convention memorial into the congressional record the previous year, Lane promised to introduce a bill for a new territory when Congress reconvened on December 6, 1852.

The Monticello Convention

On November 25, forty-four men gathered at Monticello, a settlement near the mouth of the Cowlitz River founded by Harry Darby Huntington, who hosted the convention in his home. (Several sources note the pronunciation as Mon ti SELL o, with a sibilant “c.”) Over three days, the delegates hammered out a list of reasons supporting a new territory:

• Oregon Territory was too large for statehood
• The area east of the Cascades needed coastal access, so the Columbia River was the logical dividing line
• The new territory would be a good size for an eventual state
• Plenty of natural resources were available, and settlers could be self-sufficient
• The Columbia River would always be a barrier between people and interests
• The population imbalance meant that the southern part of the territory had more influence and more money
• The capital, Salem, was too far away from northern settlements
• Southern control of the territorial legislature left out Northern interests
• A medium-sized state could serve its citizens more effectively

The memorial intentionally omitted population figures, because delegates knew the minimum required for a new territory was typically 10,000 people. There wasn’t even close to half that number in northern Oregon–yet.

Legislation introduced

On December 6, 1852, the first day of the congressional session, Lane introduced legislation to create a new Columbia Territory. He eluded discussion of the sparse population by focusing on the commercial potential of Puget Sound. Some historians suggest that Lane’s motivation was political, because reducing Oregon Territory’s size would improve its chances for statehood.

As eminent historian Edmond Meany pointed out in 1922, Lane could not have received the Monticello Convention memorial before introducing his legislation. At the time, mail to Washington City from Oregon Territory would have taken at least five weeks to arrive, traveling from Salem to San Francisco, by sea to the isthmus of Panama, by land across the isthmus, and by sea to the nation’s capital. Lane introduced his bill only seven days after the Monticello Convention ended, and a mere two days after The Columbian printed the entire convention proceedings. Lane’s bill had to be based on the Cowlitz Convention memorial of the previous summer, and on newspaper coverage of the issue, especially in The Columbian.

Monticello memorial reaches Congress

On February 8, 1853, Lane read the Monticello memorial into the record during floor debate on HR 348, the bill to create Columbia Territory. As Meany dryly points out, that happened 11 weeks, not 11 days, after the Monticello Convention. A Kentucky congressman proposed an amendment changing the new territory’s name to Washington in honor of the first president, and Lane agreed.

On February 10, HR 348 passed the House and went to the Senate, where Sen. Stephen A. Douglas suggested “Washingtonia” to avoid confusion with the national capital. (Just imagine, we could be living in Washingtonia today!) Apparently met with a lukewarm response, Douglas withdrew the amendment and the bill passed the Senate on March 2, 1853. President Millard Fillmore signed it the same day, two days before he left office.

All aboard the territorial train

On December 6, 1852, the same day Delegate Lane introduced HR 348 to create a new territory, the Oregon Territorial Legislature heard a resolution asking Congress for just that. The resolution was introduced by Isaac Ebey, territorial representative from Thurston County, which then stretched to the Canadian border and included his home base on Whidbey Island. The Territorial House adopted the resolution on January 14, followed by the Territorial Council on January 18. Assuming it took about the same time to reach Washington City as the Monticello Memorial had, the Oregon Territorial resolution would have arrived around the time President Fillmore signed the law creating Washington Territory.

Footnote or exclamation point?

Thanks to sustained promotion by The Columbian, the Monticello Convention was better publicized and better attended than that at Cowlitz Landing the prior year. The Monticello Convention did not result in the introduction of legislation. At most, the Monticello memorial may have affirmed for members of Congress that support among northern Oregonians for a new territory was still strong.

A contemporary analysis of the Monticello Convention pointed out that little primary source evidence of Monticello attendees exists. It’s as if once the convention was done they stopped thinking about the new territory: “[T]he delegates apparently returned home after unanimously approving and signing the memorial and had nothing more to say about it.” Maybe they counted on The Columbian to keep the momentum going. 

And the newspaper? Mission accomplished, its last issue was published on November 26, 1853. Sold to a staff member and another investor, it became the Washington Pioneer. In 1863, its printing press ended up in Seattle, where it printed The Washington Gazette, an ancestor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, once Seattle’s venerated morning paper and now a web-based shadow of its old self. The printing press is preserved at MOHAI, Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

Cowlitz vs. Monticello

The four panels commemorating the Monticello Convention stand in a tiny park, backed by tall, pink-flowering rhododendrons. Stone columns flank the panels, which are clean and well-maintained. Visitors can rest on a bench and read the text at leisure. It’s not the actual Monticello Convention site, though. That washed away in an 1867 Cowlitz River flood.

It’s a bit of a contrast with the Cowlitz Convention. The convention site, Cowlitz Landing, is private property and inaccessible. The Washington State Historical Society in 1922 erected a stone marker where the Highway 505 bridge crosses the Cowlitz River, about one river mile north of the landing. A tiny park features the monument, a much newer gazebo with picnic table and good river views, and three parking spaces. A few shotgun-dinged panels stand nearby, recounting Lewis County and Toledo history. It’s not a state park site. Cowlitz may have been more immediately influential, but if the space and care dedicated to preserving this piece of Washington history are any indication, Monticello appears to have won the prime spot in historical memory.

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Fast facts about Monticello Convention State Park Heritage Site

• One-acre day-use park, open year-round
• Discover Pass not required, but at a very reasonable $30 per year, you should buy one, really.
• Benches

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