As an author, one can generally choose between setting stories in real-life places or making up the place entirely. Stories like Star Wars or Game of Thrones, for example, are set in places that do not exist in real life. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum there are stories like Sleepless in Seattle or When Harry Met Sally that take place in Seattle and New York (respectively), with real-life streets, real-life airports, and more.

When I wrote my first series—Jacob Payne, Bounty Hunter—I included a mix of real places and made-up towns in the Arizona Territory. My second series—Courage on the Oregon Trail—necessitated using real places, as the entire premise of the books was that the characters are doing this actually historically verifiable thing (traveling west on the Oregon Trail).

The next series, however, was different. The premise of Oregon At Last is to follow the characters as they settle the frontier, starting from the very basics of digging wells all the way to (eventually, one day) building a bustling hotel where they can house visitors. It may be a generation or more (of fictional characters), but that has been the plan.

To that end, I decided that my fictional characters would be establishing a fictional town. It needed to be based roughly in a real location, geographically speaking. Somewhere that made logical sense for a settlement. Somewhere not too populated in the 21st century. Somewhere near water.

I looked over a map of current-day Oregon to find the perfect spot.

Very very very roughly, Eden Valley is around Oral Hull Park, in Sandy, Oregon.

There’s a river that runs roughly east to west. It’s not terribly far from Fort Vancouver. And there’s very little settlement in that part of the state now, so I am unlikely to run into logistics that affect a reader’s suspension of disbelief.

I do plan on one day creating a map of (settled, finished) Eden Valley. We’ll have to decide where the streets go, how many bridges are going to go over the river, where the proper center of town is, and more details.

But in the meantime, this is a lovely landscape on which to project all of my imagination.

Images taken from Google Street View:

On (real-life) Marmot Road, north of the river:

Green and lush and rolling hills and mountains in the distance.

On (real-life) Oral Hull Road, south of the river:

At the time of writing this, I have been to Oregon but not this part of the state. It would be so much fun to spend some time driving around the neighborhoods there and really envisioning where my characters can settle in, building out their homesteads and creating farms that will last for generations.

Eden Valley is a fictional town set in the Oregon Territory, and established fall of 1850. For all the stories of the brave pioneers that are settling Eden Valley, check out the historical women’s fiction series Oregon At Last by A.T. Butler.

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