Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Cottage Grove, OR

Cottage Grove is a city in Lane County, Oregon, the third largest city in the county, nicknamed the 'Covered Bridge Capital of Oregon'.

Cottage Grove was incorporated in 1887, and its post office was established in 1855, named by its first postmaster, G. C. Pearce, whose home was in an oak grove.

The 2020 census counted 10,574 people in Cottage Grove, living in 4,078 households, with 4,251 housing units in the city.

The city lies south of the confluence of the Row River and the Coast Fork of the Willamette River, a confluence that effectively marks the southern end of the Willamette Valley, and it sits on Interstate 5 and Oregon Route 99.

Gold mining preceded agriculture and timber as a major economic driver for the area: gold was first discovered near Bohemia Mountain southeast of town in 1858, and the Bohemia mining district grew to around 2,000 mines and more than 2,000 miners by 1865.

In the summer of 1926, Cottage Grove was the filming location for Buster Keaton's silent Civil War comedy The General, whose most famous stunt crashed a locomotive off a collapsing bridge into a ravine, and the city commemorates the production annually with Buster Keaton Days.

Later productions filmed in Cottage Grove include Stand By Me and Emperor of the North, and the famous parade sequence in Animal House was filmed on the city's downtown Main Street.

The only existing covered railroad bridge west of the Mississippi River, the National Register-listed Chambers Railroad Bridge, is in Cottage Grove, and the city restored it in 2011.

In the late 1940s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Dorena Dam on the Row River east of town, creating Dorena Lake, a recreational destination drawing an estimated 80,000 visitors annually for fishing, boating, and camping.

The Row River Trail, a paved multi-use path connecting Cottage Grove to Dorena Lake and Culp Creek, officially opened in 1998 on a former railroad corridor.