Canemah was a bustling community in the mid 1800s. It was a prime manufacturing site for Steamboats (Stern wheelers and Side wheelers) to be used on the Upper Willamette for transporting crops from the Valley.
This was the pre-railroad era. Here at Canemah freight had to be removed from ships above the waterfalls and ported over land to ships waiting below falls which then carried the freight on downriver to Portland and beyond. Warehouses lined the waterfront to hold shipped goods.
After construction of both the railroads and Willamette Falls Locks on the West side of the river, the shipping activity in Canemah slowed considerably. Canemah became a place where ship captains came to live and retire. Many of the homes during that era still stand and some of the streets bear the names of the ship captains that lived here. (Hedges, Apperson, Jerome, Miller).
Anecdotes for the history-curious:
Captain George Jerome used Canemah-built Stern wheeler 'The Onward' to float through the streets of Salem during the 1861 floods to rescue people. (visit link)
Captain Leonard White built 'The Fenix' in Canemah and it was the first steamboat to make it as far as Corvallis for which the citizens of that city gave him a banquet and a block of land.
Before Captain J.D. Miller piloted 'The Hoosier', 'The Hoosier 2', and 'The Clinton', he used a 65 ft long flat boat to move 350 bushels of wheat at a time from Dayton & Lafayette on the Yamhill River down to Canemah. His boat was powered by 4 members of the Klickatat Tribe who used poles and paddles to move the boat and were paid $16 each per trip.