Gaston, Oregon

The first known inhabitants of the Tualatin Valley were the Atfalati tribe, a subset of the Kalapuya ethnic group. Contact with Europeans in the late 1700s led to the spread of smallpox and other diseases, which devastated the Atfalati population. In 1851, due to population pressures from white settlers, surviving members of the tribe negotiated a treaty with the Oregon Territory ceding their ancestral lands throughout the Tualatin Valley to guarantee a small reservation on the banks of nearby Wapato Lake. This treaty was never ratified, and in the late 1850s, the U.S. government relocated the tribe to the Grand Ronde Reservation.[6]

Large-scale American settlement of the region began in the 1850s, due to the Donation Land Claim Act, which granted land to white settlers who moved to the Oregon Territory before 1855.[7] In the 1870s, the West Side Railroad was built from Hillsboro to Corvallis, cutting through this region. The community of Gaston developed from a railroad stop in 1872 to a commercial center. [8] Due to legal disputes, Joseph Gaston left his position at the railroad and moved to the region in 1880. He spent the next sixteen years attempting to drain Wapato Lake for farmland