Last of this Series

This is the last of the post cards about which I will blog, from the collection of cards that my friend gave to me from his family's history. This post card shows the train depot at Clatskanie, Oregon. It is a station on the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway. I will be blogging about this Railway and the devious manner in which it came into existence to compete with the Union Pacific Railroad. I could find very little about Clatskanie on the internet. It was close to an ammunition depot used by the military. So it is probably where the families and members of the military got off the train to go to the base. I looked at a map of the town today. There is a set of tracks that go through the town, still, and there is a Depot Street near the tracks. But, AMTRAK does not stop there. If you want to take AMTRAK, they do provide a bus to pick you up to take you to the nearest actual AMTRAK station.

The post card was published by the Patton Post Card Company out of Salem, Oregon. Oregon State University has three collections of works by this company. Edwin Cooke Patton was born August 12, 1868 in Salem. In 1908, he operated a Post Card Studio and the largest post card store in the Northwest in conjunction with Patton Brothers Bookstore in Salem. Patton’s studio was responsible for many early real photo views of Northwestern Oregon and the Coast. Patton was a magician in his spare time. He died December 24, 1929 in Woodburn, Oregon.