Monticello Convention State Park Heritage Site History

Monticello Convention State Park Heritage Site commemorates two meetings attended by Euro-American men that resided north of the Columbia River. The meetings produced petitions to the US Congress to establish a federal territory separate from the existing Oregon Territory.

Despite the fact that the region contemplated for the designation had fewer than the accustomed number of settler-colonists than usually justified the expense of providing the administrative functions of a territorial government, the petitions ultimately succeeded in influencing the passage of legislation establishing the Territory of Washington, approved by President Millard Fillmore on March 2, 1853.

Indigenous Lands

The Washington Territory established as a result of the Monticello Convention petitions was home to sovereign nations of Indigenous people who made their homes and stewarded the region’s natural resources as they had for thousands of years.

Indigenous people lived in homes, villages, and seasonal encampments throughout the landscape, and utilized water routes and well-trodden trails established by centuries of use to travel for subsistence, trade, and socializing.

Encroachment of European-American newcomers into the Indigenous territories began with mariners seeking oceanic passages to shorten global trade routes and to initiate the exploitation of resources such as animal furs and minerals.

Many of the Indigenous nations engaged with the newcomers, trading furs and other products harvested from their areas for novel and utilitarian manufactured items including firearms, metals, woven textiles, and distilled spirits.

Trade also brought exposure to infectious diseases for which the Indigenous people had no established immunity, causing epidemics of sickness and high rates of mortality within their communities.

Colonization

Global competition between European superpowers—Spain, England, France, and Russia—impacted this far corner of the globe as each nation’s ability to project military and commercial influence rose and fell. Spain agreed to share its territorial claim (grounded in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas) with England in the Nootka Conventions, signed in the 1790s. Spain transferred its claim to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty (1819) which was confirmed by newly-independent Mexico in 1832.

England asserted its jurisdiction over today’s Washington by granting licenses to commercial enterprises that developed fur trading operations in the region. All operations were consolidated under the direction of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) by 1821. The HBC administered posts at Fort Nisqually, Cowlitz Prairie, Fort Colville, and Spokane House from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River.

In a bid to strengthen America’s claims to the region, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned a Corps of Discovery commanded by Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark in 1803 to travel overland through newly-acquired US territories to today’s Washington. They were directed to discover and map “the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.” Their route within today’s Washington mainly followed the courses of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. A banker and writer from Philadelphia, Nicholas Biddle, accurately edited and published the expedition’s journals in 1814, publicizing the wonders and opportunities of the northwest nationwide.

As knowledge of the region grew among citizens of the United States from the reports of Lewis & Clark and others, interest began to grow in emigrating to the “Oregon Country” for the opportunities it seemed to afford to:

• acquire land with a potential for bountiful farm harvests
• escape disagreeable climatic conditions and diseases
• leave behind the growing dissensions around the institution of slavery (the early “provisional government” of Oregon forbade Black persons, free or enslaved, from settling in the territory)
• run from legal or financial troubles
• enjoy the sheer adventure it offered

Immigrants from the United States began to trickle, then pour, into today’s Oregon and Washington after the joint claims to the region by Britain and the United States were decided in the Americans’ favor in 1846. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 enabled arriving immigrants to claim thousands of acres of Indigenous lands and establish their private ownership without any compensation to the Indigenous people who had lived on and stewarded the land, often for hundreds of generations.

The vast majority of immigrants concluded their journey in the Willamette River Valley, founding the settlement of Oregon City in 1848, and beginning farms throughout the fertile valley. By the 1850 US Census, only about 1,200 enumerated souls (Indigenous people were generally not counted) lived north of the Columbia River in the Oregon Territory, less than 10% of the recorded population of the territory. The majority of that population lived just north of the Columbia, in the area around the old HBC Fort Vancouver.

Growing Discontent

One of the first American emigrant parties to push northward from Fort Vancouver was led by Michael T. Simmons in 1844. The group of five families totaling 31 people included George Bush, a Black man whose wealth, which he had inherited from a former employer, allowed him to generously provide wagons and supplies for many of his fellow travelers in the group. The party purportedly moved northward to settle at the southern end of Puget Sound due to the Oregon provisional government’s exclusionary policy toward Bush.

By 1851, settlement had increased farther north along the shores of Puget Sound, fueled by commercial interests cutting timber to supply the lumber needs of the California gold rush. This population desired basic services such as mail delivery, roads, and military protection against the resistance of Indigenous warriors protesting their displacement by the newcomers. The Oregon Territorial Legislature was seen by many as unresponsive to these needs, appropriating nearly all of the funds raised by taxation solely for the benefit of residents living south of the Columbia River.

Some American settlers also wished to appropriate the remaining farming operations of the HBC in the territory. It was some of the best farmland in the territory, not only because it had been farmed for years by the HBC operations, but in many cases the lands were the original treeless prairies that had been maintained and enhanced for centuries by Indigenous residents.

In the wake of a rousing Olympia Fourth of July celebration address by lawyer John Chapman, a group of men including some of the Simmons party (although not, apparently, George Bush) and others that had arrived later, met at Cowlitz Landing on August 29, 1851.

The delegates at that meeting tasked Chapman to write a memorial to the US Congress explaining their desire to have a separate federal territory established north of the Columbia River. The heart of their entreaty was stated thus:

That Government and order is contemplated for the convenience and benefit of the people, and

That every community and settlement of Citizens participating in the burthens of Government are entitled to its benefits and protection, and

That when ever any portion of That Community, from locality and Geographical position are left out of the existing rule & order ….

It becomes the duty … of this separated & neglected portion of the whole community … for the reestablishment and organization of a Government, for their own convenience and protection.

The Committee most respectfully request that Congress will pass an act organizing a separate Territorial Government North of the Columbia River … to be known and designated as “Columbia Territory…”

The memorial was published and sent to Territorial Delegate Joseph Lane in Washington, D.C. Lane filed the petition with the appropriate congressional committee, but no action was taken.

The next year another lawyer, John Bigelow, delivered another inspiring Fourth of July speech, predicting that “the force of our example and the advancement of free principles will … exert such a powerful influence that benighted China will wake up from her sleep of ages and take strides forward in civil freedom.” A weekly newspaper launched in Olympia shortly after, the Columbian, took up the advocacy of a separate territory north of the Columbia River, and promoted another meeting.

The Monticello Convention

The second meeting was held in November 1853 at the home/hotel of Harry Darby Huntington, located on land he had filed a Donation Land Claim on that included a site long used by Indigenous people as a seasonal camp beside the Cowlitz River. Its location a short distance upstream from the confluence with the Columbia River placed it squarely on the route traveled by nearly everyone traveling the “Cowlitz Trail” between the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound. The place had come to be known as “Monticello,” and Huntington’s accommodation was called the Territorial Monticello Hotel.

The 44 delegates to the Monticello Convention, as it became known, hailed from the Cowlitz and Chehalis Valleys, Olympia, Seattle, and as far away as Port Townsend. The document they produced and forwarded on to the US Congress was more concise than the petition from two years previous. The Monticello Convention document remained focused on insisting that the settlers located north of the Columbia River were poorly represented in the existing Oregon Territory. It also extolled the resource and population potential of the proposed territory and concluded with:

… your petitioners humbly pray that your honorable bodies will, at an early day, pass a law organizing the district of country before described under a Territorial Government to be named the “Territory of Columbia.”

The document was signed on November 25, 1852, and sent by means of the circuitous mail system of the day to the US Congress in Washington, D.C.

Washington Territory

Due to a months-long delay in delivering mail between Oregon Territory and the rest of the United States, local residents did not find out what happened next for some time.

Even as the Monticello Convention document slowly worked its way east, Congressional Delegate Lane introduced a resolution calling for the establishment of the Territory of Columbia on December 6, 1852. Lane had apparently read of the planned Monticello Convention in the Columbian, which was delivered to a handful of subscribers in Washington, D.C. and decided to act on the previous petition.

Lane may have also had an ulterior political motive in promoting the territorial division, as he understood that increasing population north of the Columbia could threaten his re-election. Perhaps he felt it would be better to remove the northerners (who would likely prefer one of their own) from his constituency.

Lane’s bill was reported out of committee on February 8, 1853. The Monticello Convention document, having finally arrived in the nation’s capital, was read into the congressional record. During the House floor debate, the issue of the small population of the proposed territory was raised by some representatives. Lane responded that the population was about the same as the population of Oregon Territory when it had been created, and that people were rapidly emigrating to the region as a result of the Donation Land Claim Act.

Representative Richard Stanton of Kentucky objected to naming the territory “Columbia,” and offered an amendment to replace the name with “Washington,” to honor the first president of the United States. Again, political considerations seem to have played a part in the renaming of the proposed territory. Some Southern members of Congress worried that an eventual State of Columbia could further tip the scales against the institution of slavery. Changing the name to honor a preeminent national hero from the South apparently assuaged some of their concern.

Not wanting to delay passage of the bill, Lane agreed to the change. On March 2, the US Senate approved the bill without debate and it was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore later the same day. On March 17, 1853, President Fillmore appointed Isaac I. Stevens to be the first Territorial Governor of the new territory.

News of the establishment of Washington Territory was reported in the Columbian on April 30, 1853. Governor Stevens planned to complete a transcontinental railway survey during his journey to the new posting, and arrived in Olympia in the fall, taking up his duties on November 25, 1853, exactly one year after the signing of the Monticello Convention.

His term in office, lasting until August 11, 1857, would be marked by considerable conflict with the Indigenous nations whose homelands were colonized by the establishment of Washington Territory.

Making a State Park

To commemorate the significance of the Monticello Convention in the history of Washington, many people lobbied for the placement of an historical marker near the site at the centennial anniversary of the event.

A small land parcel, located more than three miles from the actual site of the Territorial Monticello Hotel, was donated to the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) by the Pacific Paperboard Company in January 1952, and the WSPRC authorized funds for the marker in May of that year. The completed marker was dedicated at a ceremony on November 24, 1952.

In 1958, the site was deemed necessary for the improvement of the state highway leading into the city of Longview. The property was purchased by the Highway Department from the WSPRC for $7,000 and the sign was put into storage.

In 1964, a proposal to relocate the sign on a highway frontage road was discussed, but never completed. John McClelland, the editor and publisher of the Longview Daily News, pushed for restoration of the marker as a reminder of a significant moment in the story of Washington. On February 9, 1967, the WSPRC and the City of Longview concluded an agreement to use city property to display the restored monument. Monticello Convention State Park Heritage Site was dedicated on December 15, 1967, featuring three signboards with text describing the significance of the Monticello Convention. The names of all of the signers of both petitions are listed on the signs, although some names may be inaccurate. The original document was lost long ago, probably in a fire; the names shown were listed as they were read into the Congressional Record by Joseph Lane.

At the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Monticello Convention on November 24, 2002, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed delivered a keynote address at the rededication of the monument. In 2024, locally-based contractor JH Kelly donated services to complete a restoration of the aging wood signs.