Fanno Creek in Tigard is named after Augustus Fanno who received a donation land claim in 1847 in the Tigard area after migrating to Oregon from Missouri. His grandfather had fled the French Revolution and migrated to Maine in 1789. Augustus was born in Maine in 1804, briefly becoming a seaman and then a teacher in Mississippi and Missouri, where he married Martha Ferguson in 1833. They had a son, Eugene, in 1841.
The Fanno family left Independence, Missouri, for Oregon in 1846, crossing the Oregon Trail and, after six months, reaching the Columbia River. Martha Fanno died in childbirth upon arrival and was buried in Linn City. The widowed Augustus, with his young son, worked his Tigard land claim and remarried Rebecca Jane Denney (1819-1909) in 1851. Rebecca was the daughter of Fielding and Jane (Hicklin) Denney and had been a teacher who ventured west in 1849. Her brother Thomas Denney farmed a land claim next door to that of Augustus Fanno. Today, Denney Road recalls this pioneering family.
Together, Augustus and Rebecca Fanno prospered cultivating yellow Danver onions on their farm. They hired local laborers, paying them in supplies. They would have six children. Fanno Creek, which bears their name, ran through their property as a tributary of the Tualatin River and earlier had supported an Atfalati Kalapuya Indian campsite.
The Fannos worked with the local Indians, who taught them to fish for trout in the Creek, and the local Indians traded their labor on the Fanno Farm for supplies. The Kalapuyans are a linguistic group that occupied the valley between the Coast Range and the Cascades. The picture of the Atfalati Indians in front of their tule mat teepee is typical of the Atfalati Kalapuyan summer houses that had occupied a campsite on the Fanno property…