Yoncalla, OR

Yoncalla is a Douglas County city whose name comes from the Yoncalla-speaking Native Americans of the Umpqua Valley. Settlers arrived by covered wagon in 1848, and Jesse Applegate followed in 1849; Douglas County's own chronology records his family settling here that year. The city was incorporated in 1901, after the valley had already served as a county-seat setting in the early county years. The Applegate House near Yoncalla keeps the settlement story connected to a much older Yoncalla winter-village landscape. The local shorthand is Umpqua Valley, Applegate trail, and a town name tied to the area's earlier inhabitants.