If you're looking for a little pocket of the past in the lush Willamette Valley area, you can't do better than focus on real estate in Brownsville, Oregon. Its story reaches straight back to the first settlers arriving on the Oregon Trail. As local history has it, the town was founded by three families--the Blakeys, the Kirks, and the Browns--who had continued to move south through the valley, looking for just the right spot to settle.

On the lazy banks of a little river (the Calapooia), some 80 miles south of the Columbia River Gorge, they lost their cattle in the tall lush grasses. Deeming that a sign, James Blakely platted a town, naming it for his uncle Hugh Brown, who established a store nearby. Today real estate in Brownsville, Oregon is identified as sitting roughly midway between Salem and Eugene, just off Route 5. By 1912, its population reached 1,000. By 2003, it had reached 1,400.

In the summer of 1887, Brownsville held its first Pioneer Picnic. A reunion of the first settlers, membership in the association was open to anyone who had arrived before January 1855 and continued to live in Linn County. Membership has been broadened since then to include all Linn County residents. In the summer of 1919, much of the real estate in Brownsville, Oregon was destroyed in what is now known as its Great Fire. Fortunately, several buildings in the center of town were brick, and effectively served as a fire wall.

Numbers on Real Estate in Brownsville, Oregon

As of the last census, there were 585 houses in town. Only six building permits per year, on average, have been issued for residential real estate since 1996. The average cost per house in 2003 amounted to about $157,600, higher than the state average. Brownsville children attend either one of the two private schools, or the Linn County public schools 10 miles west in Halsey. Median income is about $38,000.