Dry Hills, Wheat Country
Ione sits on Willow Creek in Morrow County, Oregon, thirty miles south of the Columbia River in the rolling wheat country of the Columbia Plateau — dry grass hills and creek-bottom farms in a landscape that feels nothing like the rainy western Oregon of popular imagination.
In the high Columbia Plateau country of Morrow County, a trading post became a town and these Fosters passed through on their way to somewhere else
Why It Started and What People Did There
Ione sits on Willow Creek in Morrow County, about thirty miles south of the Columbia River, in the rolling wheat country of the Columbia Plateau — a landscape of dry grass hills and creek-bottom farms that feels nothing like the western Oregon of popular imagination, with its rain and its Douglas fir, and everything like the high dry interior West where wheat grew well and people came because land was available and the price was right.
The first settler of record at the site was Edward Cluff, who arrived in 1872. The man who actually made a town of it was Elisha Sperry, who acquired land nearby, recognized the need for a trading centre in the district, and hired a surveyor to prepare a four-block town plat. He named it Ione for a young girl — Ione Arthur, whose father was working for him at the time — a naming custom that the American West practised with charming frequency, christening permanent places after temporary people. The post office was established in 1884. The branch line of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company arrived from Heppner Junction in 1888, following Willow Creek upstream through Ione on its way to the county seat at Heppner, and with the railroad came the grain elevators and the commercial activity that turned a trading post into a proper town.
Where It Is and What People Do There Now
Ione is a small community of around 350 people on the Columbia Plateau, in the sheep-and-wheat country that Morrow County has always been. The creek-bottom farms grow grain; the upland benches support cattle and sheep; the surrounding hills have the dry, golden quality of high desert rangeland. It is remote country — Heppner, the county seat, is the nearest town of consequence — and its remoteness is part of its character. The families who have farmed Willow Creek for four or five generations know the land in the detailed, specific way that comes from long habitation, and the community organized itself around that knowledge.
Morrow County today is one of Oregon's more quietly productive agricultural counties, its population small relative to its land area, its economy built on grain, cattle, and the wind energy installations that have gone up on the open ridges in recent decades. The Columbia River, thirty miles north, is the region's great geographic fact — the highway through the Cascades, the source of the irrigation water that has transformed the lower river country, the boundary between Oregon and Washington. Ione sits far enough from it to be in a different world, the dry interior plateau
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