Sumpter, Oregon

Sumpter is just one of those neat little towns locked down in time, rich in history, isolated, and well ... you just want to live there. Fate only knows how one might eke out a living in Sumpter as it is in its own time continuum.

In October of 2003 I had the privilege of visiting this town for the second time. The year before I had spent only a few hours there, visited the historical City of Sumpter dredge and headed on my way. This year I actually spent a night at The Depot Inn motel, visited The Gold Post Country Store, and had a wonderful dinner at the Elkhorn Saloon (which was for sale for $195K).

As I walked the town that late afternoon taking pictures I could not help but notice a small herd of deer that had strolled into town to have a great feast in the downtown area under a couple of apple trees.

The Gold Post Country Store is worth stopping at. Teri Strimple runs the store and it has a really neat museum in the back. She advertises her store as the "The 'Almost Everything' Country Store and it truly is an amazing store. Well worth the stop and Teri can fill you in on a lot of the towns history. Her store is built on the old Columbia Brewery site and the museum is loaded with pictures and other artifacts of early Sumpter.

Sumpter is at an altitude of 4,424 feet. It was founded in 1862 by three to five North Carolinians (Asbury, Henderson, Real, Flannigan, and Johnson, Confederates who had decided the Civil War was not worth dying for.

With the railroad coming in October of 1896 Sumpter grew to almost 4000 people by 1903. Sumpter, depending on different sources, had three newspapers, four to six churches, twelve to twenty four saloons, sidewalks, electric lights, a brewery, an opera house, a hospital, two brick banks, two to seven hotels, five rooming houses, six restaurants, the Oregon Lumber Company lumber mill, a school with four teachers and some 200 pupils, 35 mines in the region, a brick yard, a smelter (built in 1900), four trains running daily between Baker City and Sumpter, a water system, a wooden planked main street, baseball and basketball teams, an undertaker, five assay houses, a dairy, five cigar stores, one to two cigar factories, a China town, a red light district, three livery stables, three blacksmith shops, one wagon maker, three to seven general stores, two drug stores, telephone and telegraph offices, three meat markets, a volunteer fire department, seven daily stage coach lines, an express office, two plumbing stores, four barbershops, six law offices, a dance hall, three hardware stores, and two galleries (one photograph and one shooting).

People lived and worked hard in Sumpter. Typical wages were $2.50 to $3.00 a day and a shift in the mines was 10 hours and 12 hours in the mill, and both worked seven days a week. The Griffin Hotel charged 25 cents for a meal and 25 cents for a room.

On Sunday, August 13, 1917, at 12:55 p.m. the town was destroyed by a fire that started in the cook's room of the Capital Hotel and by the end of the day the town was in rubble. Twelve city blocks destroyed.

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