A hundred years ago this was the center of a hardscrabble community known as Grandview. A church that was also used as a community hall and school stood in this rock-picked meadow. Some of the old homesteader names in the Grandview area were Counsel, Allingham, Miller, Davis, Buchanan, Fullerton, Edmonson, Tate, Glover, News, Jordan, Selman, and Hendricks.
"In about 1912 the flood of homesteaders came and the whole desert was taken up. Nick Lambert put up a store, Mrs. Wears had the post office, Ransom a blacksmith shop, and somehow else a barber shop. Then a school was built and that was Grandview... A family settled on every 160 acres. They fenced the land, cleared the sagebrush, ploughed the ground that could be ploughed after the rocks were picked off, and then starved out and left. The Grandview country was a busy community at one time, but the people finally all left one at a time. They thought once they were going to have water from Suttle Lake to water the desert but when that hope faded they all left..." ~Harry Heising, from the book Jefferson County Reminiscences.
If you choose to find our Canadian Bench Series of geocaches, you will see why water was so hard to obtain for the early settlers. Each year they would pick the rocks from their fields, and each year the frost would heave up more, until it seemed the best crop was rocks! You will see many rock walls and piles where they placed each years "crop" on top of the last. Most of the homestead lands eventually went back to the Government as marginal land, but in this location a few stragglers hung on. An old friend remembers a store and gas station here when this was the road from Sisters to the crossing of the Deschutes, the Crooked and then to Madras and beyond. He thinks both businesses were gone by 1955. When the Jordan Road was relocated to the south because of the newly constructed Round Butte Dam and subsequent Lake Billy Chinook in 1964, old Grandview was pretty much bypassed. The Grandview Cemetery is 3.5 miles southeast as the crow flies (or 5 miles by road) and many of the original homesteaders names can be found on the stones there. There is also a geocache there, Grandpa's Homestead.
This is a really straightforward find just beyond the remains of the town. Please step lightly, cache-in-trash-out any modern trash if you can and enjoy the history. GeoFishy #89 happily awaits the first finders.