Buster Keaton brought Hollywood to Cottage Grove (Part 1 of 2)

Buster Keaton brought Hollywood to Cottage Grove (Part 1 of 2)

Author: www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com) December 11, 2025 Duration: 9:25
IF A COTTAGE Grove logger had been bonked on the head in January 1926, and woke up six months later, he would have scarcely recognized his home town. There was a whole new Main Street built way out east of Main Street, with businesses and boardinghouses and banks and everything.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2409d-1002b.buster-keaton-the-general-in-cottage-grove-668.061.html)

The Offbeat Oregon History Podcast is a daily service from the Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column. Each weekday morning, a strange-but-true story from Oregon's history from the archives of the column is uploaded. An exploding whale, a few shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. Source citations are included with the text version on the Web site at https://offbeatoregon.com.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Offbeat Oregon History podcast
Podcast Episodes
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ABOUT 20 YEARS ago, Alex Hirsch, a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, set out to make a low-budget short animated film that he hoped would become a demo reel one day. It was called “Gravity…
The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 2 of 2) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 9:06
HALFWAY THROUGH HIS second term in office, Governor Chamberlain ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, and won the election. So he resigned his office as governor in favor of his Secretary of State, Frank W. Benson, and prep…
The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 1 of 2) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 9:35
IF YOU ASK most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in th…
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Duration: 8:11
Happily ensconced in their little bubble of like-minded businessmen and politicians, the land thieves had gotten to be a bit out of touch with how their activities were playing with the public. As the new century dawned,…
Land-fraud swindlers plundered Oregon badly (Part 1 of 2) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 9:17
ON THE MORNING of Dec. 7, 1904, Stephen A.D. Puter had just arrived at the office of U.S. Marshal Jack Matthews. He was expecting some friends to come by … and bail him out of jail. Puter had just been convicted of maste…