History of Bump City Oregon and the surrounding Farragut County

Bump City, Oregon

      Ottis Sutter was an organizer of wagon trains from Saint Joseph, Missouri. He guided folks across the wide prairies on the unmarked path called the Oregon Trail. After twelve trips back and forth, he settled down and homesteaded at the site of the traditional last stop on the long journey from the east. He used to laughingly comment that this spot always stood out like a bump on a log and accordingly he named it -- Bump City.

       In 1849 Ottis married Hannah Grench, a young widow. Together they had three sons, George, Gleeson and Oliver. In time George moved to Sacramento and in time became a farmer of some reputation in the growing of olives and almonds, which he always pronounced as AMONDS. George always swore the orchards were haunted and that the ghosts had scared the L out of the tasty nuts.

       The middle child, Gleeson, was nicknamed Giddy. He was full of life and was a prankster, the bane of all the folks that lived in early Bump City as he played practical joke after practical joke. Unfortunately he died of scarlet fever when he was fourteen, but his giggling ghost still haunts about town. Even today if someone gets the giggles in Bump, folks call it gettin' Giddy.

       The youngest Sutter boy, Oliver was a good lad and loved to help his mother in the kitchen. As much as he loved to cook, he loved to eat which was reflected in the girth of his belly. Over the years he became quite an accomplished cook and eventually built Sutter’s Inn just below Devils’ Peak and only 15 miles from Bump City. It was here that the spreading oak and maple trees mixed headily with the evergreens and cedars of the mountains.

       Oliver married a small, rather severe, sharp-angled woman by the name of Edna Hickabee. The Hickabees were one of Bump City’s founding families and there were rumors that all Hickabee women were witches. The gossip was so intense that part of the family, Gwendolyn, and her daughter Mary, packed up and moved to Cannon Beach out on the Pacific coast.

       Edna paid little mind to her relatives in town and stayed with Oliver. They had one daughter, who herself eventually had a daughter. Folks in town even gossiped the Sutter women had a touch of witch in them too. Even today, kids in town tease Becky-Sue Sutter about witches brooms and black cats.

       For a time the old Sutter's Inn was always filled with folks sharing Oliver's good food and Edna’s cordial lodging. Not long after Oliver and Edna had expanded Sutter's Inn for the third or fourth time, a strange family called Grimm moved to Bump City from an unknown township in New Hampshire. The Grimm's were a spooky lot, always dressing in black -- not you're Sunday-go-to-meeting black, but rather a rag-tag, dusty, ugly-looking black. All their clothes were crafted of the same coarse material whether it be a pair of trousers, a jacket, or a long widow dress.

       The Grimm's could hardly be called sociable and shied away from the other folks of town who were complacent to whisper in hushed voices as they walked by. The Grimm's added a bit of spice to the local gossip mill when, not long after they got here, they bought Happy Valley, the forty acres across the rutted trail from the Sutter's Inn. Much to Oliver Sutter’s chagrin, the Grimm’s turned that pretty little meadow it into a burying field, a cemetery. If that wasn't bad enough, in plain sight of the inn the Grimm's built a two story mortuary. Even brand new it looked old and weathered.

      Now settled, the Grimm family got down to the business at hand; the selling of burial plots and caring for the dead folks of the area. It wasn’t long after that, late at night, the folks in town began hearing the muffled clanking of the Grimm horses hooves on the cobbled streets and the monotonous, squeaking axle of their shrouded wagon as they wheeled through town to pick up the body of someone who just died.

       Needless to say, just after the Happy Valley Cemetery opened business at Sutter's Inn fell off quicker than a snowball off a hot skillet. Oliver pleaded with the Grimms to move the cemetery and their mortuary but the Grimms were resolved to stay. If it wasn't for the Sutter's selling honey and wild berry preserves, they would be broke for sure waiting for Bump City folks to wander out for a fine meal. Got to be hard feeling between the Grimms and the Sutter's, still is to this day.

       On the positive side of founding families in Bump City was the Wolfe family. Thaddeus Logsdon Wolfe was nearly sixty at the time he weathered the long journey by jostling wagon all the way from Buffalo, New York, in 1845. He was accompanied by his somewhat homely wife Rachel, and their three year old son George Michael. Their journey was a long one and made more difficult by a second wagon pulled by a pair of large, stubborn oxen. In the second wagon was a massive printing press and stacks and stacks of bundled blank paper. Old Mr. Wolfe, kindly called T. L. by those who knew him was a journalist who had aspired from the beginnings of his career in London, to own his own newspaper. As a young man he had crossed the Atlantic to America and here he kept his dream alive by saving every penny he had to afford his dream.

       It was only four years before that he had met Rachel, a hot-tempered spinster with few prospects for marriage. T.L. had struck a deal with Rachel’s father -- he would marry her and in exchange her father would give him the money needed to buy a printing press and the wagons to move it west to Oregon, where opportunity waited. It took four years to gather everything together and early on George Michael had been born.

       In 1851 T. L. Wolfe published and printed the first edition of the Bump City newspaper, Bump In The Night. The newspaper is still operated by the Wolfe family from the original site in downtown Bump City.

Elizabeth Sutter

July 4, 1996