Weekender: Cottage Grove, Ore.
Cottage Grove offers more than just a great lunch
By Carolyn Price
Photo at right: At the right height you can don butterfly wings thanks to one of the 20 murals around town in Cottage Grove.
We had never been to Cottage Grove, Ore. but on a trip to California last summer, our family decided to pull off the freeway for a lunch stop there.
Located 20 miles south of Eugene off Interstate 5, Cottage Grove is known as the Covered Bridge Capital of Oregon. Parking on Main Street, we looked around and discovered there was more to this little town than wooden bridges and found ourselves trying to figure out what to do first: eat, find the bridges, head into the gold-miner’s museum or seek out the town’s historic murals.
Outdoors NW publisher Carolyn Price at the Bohemia Gold Mining Museum
As everything is close in Cottage Grove, a town of about 9,000 people, we forgot our lunch plans and ducked into the Bohemia Gold Mining Museum.
The museum’s curator, dressed in authentic 1860s miner’s garb, welcomed us with a huge smile and showed us around. Miners stampeded to Cottage Grove when gold was first discovered in the Cascade foothills east of the town in 1863, transforming the community into a gold mining boom town.
The town hosts the Bohemia Mining Days Festival on July 19 –22, where visitors can take part in the Grand Miners Parade and hands-on gold panning. On our visit, we settled for a souvenir photo at the museum with the curator in front of the faux mining shaft.
Downtown murals depicting a covered bridge (left) and legendary writer Opal Whiteley (right).
Of the 20 murals around town, our favorite was of Cottage Grove’s Opal Whiteley, a noted amateur nature writer and a child prodigy who was able to memorize and categorize vast amounts of information on plants and animals. Her brilliant—and sometimes controversial writings on the natural world—were read by presidents and kings the world over. Sadly, she spent the last 50 years of her life in a mental institution in England from a head injury and died at age 95 in 1992.
Seven of Lane County’s 20 covered bridges can be found during a self-guided tour around Cottage Grove, best done on bike. The tour starts downtown and heads along the paved Row River Trail toward Dorena Lake. Since we were on foot, we instead followed Main Street past the Visitor’s Center and the replica Centennial Bridge, and found Swinging Bridge, a swaying suspension bridge which spans Mosby Creek near Prospector Park.
Crossing Swinging Bridge over Mosby Creek
Finally, stomachs growling, we popped into Buster’s Main Street Café—voted the number one restaurant in Cottage Grove. The restaurant was named after Buster Keaton, who filmed the silent movie, “The General,” in Cottage Grove in 1926.
It was probably the best, if not longest, lunch stop we’ve ever made.
Carolyn Price is publisher of Outdoors NW.
Resources:
Cottage Grove Chamber of Commerce: www.cgchamber.com
Opal Whiteley Memorial Mural: www.cottagegrove.net
Lane County Tourism: www.EugeneCascadesCoast.org
