Cherry Grove, OR

Cherry Grove sits on the north bank of the Tualatin River where it leaves the Northern Oregon Coast Range and enters Patton Valley. Swedish immigrant August Lovegren founded the community in 1911 after running a mill in Preston, Washington. He brought a sawmill, a rail connection, and an unusually ambitious idea for a small valley settlement: a private electric system powered by the mill’s boiler. A dam finished in 1913 created a log-retention pond, but the January 1914 flood destroyed the dam and boiler. The remains of that industrial chapter still shape how the hamlet is remembered.

Today the setting is a mix of river, forested slopes, farms, and scattered homes south of Forest Grove. The Tualatin is the geographic thread, running through Patton Valley as the Coast Range opens toward the Willamette Valley. Cherry Grove’s post office operated from 1912 until service moved to Gaston in 1959, a small detail that marks the shift from an independent mill community toward a more dispersed rural pattern. Local history collections preserve photographs and records of Lovegren’s mill, the railroad, flood damage, and later dam proposals. The place remains easy to understand from the road: water below, timbered hills behind, and old mill ambitions embedded in the landscape.