Fort Stevens was named for General Isaac Ingalls Stevens, first Governor of Washington Territory, who died a hero of the Civil War of 1862. The fort was built in 1846 and decommissioned in 1947. Some 3000 acres of sandy wasteland known as Clatsop Sand Plains were stabilized here in the 1930’s by the planting of beach grass, shrubs and trees. This park area was donated to the public by Clatsop County in 1955.

The Columbia River to the north was discovered by the American fur trader, Captain Robert Gray in 1792 and was named after his ship. Lewis and Clark, the first Americans to make an overland expedition to the Pacific Coast, camped at Fort Clatsop in 1805-06 four miles east of this point.
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WELCOME TO FORT VANCOUVER
The London-Based Hudson’s Bay Company established an extensive fur trading network throughout the Pacific Northwest, utilizing two dozen posts, six ships, and about 600 employees during peak seasons. Fort Vancouver was the administrative center and principal supply depot of this “Columbia Department,” controlling about 700,000 square miles stretching from Russian Alaska to Mexican California, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
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The Fort became a center of activity and influence, supported by a multicultural village with inhabitants from over 35 different ethnic and tribe groups. The first Hospital, school, library, grist mill, saw mill, dairy, shipbuilding, and orchard in the region were all centered at Fort Vancouver.

A part of the National Park System since 1948, today the park is also part of the Vancouver National Historic Reserve. Fort Vancouver has been designated the premier historical archeological site in the Pacific Northwest. A strong combination of archeological and historical research informs the way the site is reconstructed and its past shared with visitors. A collection of over two million museum items is cared for here, spanning the american Indian, fur trade, and U.S. Army occupation of the area.

AN ENGLISH GARDEN IN THE WILDERNESS
Planting a garden was one of the first things the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) did when they established Fort Vancouver. At its height, in the mid-1840’s, the garden had expanded to eight acres and provided not only produce but also large numbers of flowering plants and shrubs, and fruit trees for the pleasure of the fort’s residents and visitors. The larger gardening operation was symbolic of the power that the HBC exerted over the entire region and was representative of their extensive agricultural enterprises. In 1836, American missionary Henry Spalding described the garden as “...about 5 acres laid out in good order, stored with almost every species of vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers.” His observations of the region’s farming potential, and those of other Americans, stimulated immigration from the eastern United States. In 1843 approximately 900 settlers made the journey to Fort Vancouver. By 1846 more than 8,000 had arrived in the Oregon Country, leading to the end of HBC dominance. The garden today is a small, interpretive representation of the larger historic garden. A dedicated cadre of volunteers and staff plant heirloom fruits and vegetable, herbs, and flowers to give a feeling of the abundance that was once here. Just as in the 1840s, the plants in today’s garden provide produce for the fort’s kitchen and a place of beauty and rest for visitors.

Caption: The fort’s original orchard was characterized by full size, ingrafted apple trees with the wide spacing. Today, this style of “farm orchard” had been recreated with seedlings of old English cider varieties and clones of Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree. Modern renditions, courtesy of the National Park Service.

THE VANCOUVER FARM
Fort Vancouver was the first large scale farming operation in the Pacific Northwest. Beginning in 1825, the Hudson’s Bay Company established a number of farms and dairies in the area to reduce the high cost of importing food from England.Agriculture at the fort extended for thirty miles along the Columbia River and ten miles inland. The farms included over 1,400 acres of cultivated fields, thousands of acres of pastures, seven to nine acres of formal gardens, and a five acre orchard. Numerous barns, stables, and sheds sheltered a wide variety of livestock including cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, goats, and poultry.

The products from the farms and dairies provided food for the Fort Vancouver employees, a number of other Hudson’s Bay Company forts in the regions and crews of supply ships. The bountiful surpluses from these operations also allowed the company to feed thousands of starving Oregon Trail immigrants and sell goods to the Russian American Fur Company in Alaska.