This history sign is located at the trailhead for the Hindman Springs Area. There is also a second sign at the trailhead about preservation of the Camp Polk Meadow.
Marker Name: Camp Polk History
Marker Text: Human activities have affected this area for 10,000 years.
Pvt. Jonas Belknap of Company A, 1st Oregon Infantry was one of 40 soldiers at Camp Polk September 28, 1865 - May 24, 1866. The soldiers were part of an Army campaign against Paiute Indians east of the Cascades, with orders to make the camp on the Crooked River. The soldiers received no further orders and saw no Paiutes, but killed more than 100 deer.
Samuel M.W. Hindman. Here at Camp Polk, located along the wagon road, Hindman purchased and settled on 280 acres during 1868-1870. The Hindman family built a barn, a house and a rail-fenced enclosure, operated a small store and a post office (1875-88), and created a cemetery. During 1870-81 he maintained the road between Big Lake and the Crooked River, then was Justice of the Peace in Prineville. Until 1885, maps named only three Central Oregon settlements: Prineville, Warm Springs, and Camp Polk.
Martha Taylor Cobb crossed the Cascades with her family in 1880. She ran a roadhouse east of Sisters until she married Charley Hindman, son of Samuel and Jane, in 1902. She ran the Hindman Ranch until she was laid to rest in the Camp Polk Cemetery in 1940. Martha’s sister Etta, married into the Fryrear family that homesteaded the northern part of the meadow in 1883.
Andrew Wiley Family in a photo taken about 1900. Wiley was an adventurer, hunter, stock farmer, entrepreneur and early homesteader in the Sweet Home area in 1853. During 1860-64 he scouted the wagon road route from Lebanon across the Cascades to the meadow at Camp Polk.
Freight Wagon of the turn-of-the-century era drawn by mules in Central Oregon. At Camp Polk, the Hindmans ran a way-station on the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Military Wagon Road that connected the mid-Willamette Valley with Central Oregon for commerce and settlement.
Hindman Family. Samuel and Jane Hindman with sons Charley and Daniel (daughter Sara Nancy is absent) in about 1868 shortly before they left Albany to settle at Camp Polk. The Hindmans crossed the Plains in 1862 and settled first in Linn County. They brought a self-sufficient way of life that had developed in the Ohio River Valley a generation earlier.
Cowboys take a smoke break in the horse corral at the Hindman barn circa 1930s The barn which was built about 1870, suffered severe damage in a windstorm in 1990.
Hindman Ranch. The Hindman house was located by the road on the south side of the spring channel, opposite the old barn. Note the root cellar used for keeping foods cool. The house was taken down in 1960.
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