Photographs of rural farming community near Mt. Bell (Bells Mountain), Washington, approximately 1885-1895

In the late 1800’s, many Scandinavians settled in central Clark County, an area northeast of Vancouver and east of Battle Ground, Washington, near a mountain locally named Mt. Bells.

The mountain was named for John S. Bell who homesteaded at the foot of the mountain in 1880 . He was a farmer, a member of the legislature and later operated a general merchandise store in Brush Prairie, near Battle Ground.

Of the many Scandinavians who settled in central Clark County, Peter Onsdorff (1857-1936) became prominent as a merchant and a founder of Battle Ground. Onsdorff homesteaded on Bell Mountain near Battle Ground in the 1880s and then moved with his wife in 1902, to what is now Battle Ground.

Onsdorff and D.B. Mickey platted the town in 1903. A 1903-04 business directory listed the town population as 75, and mentioned that Battle Ground was on the line of the Portland, Vancouver and Yakima railway. Onsdorff was postmaster, a school board member and a leader in establishing the First Christian Church,

In the area of Battle Ground, two communities with early settlers were Dublin and Maple Grove. Among the earliest homesteaders in the Maple Grove area were George Gasaway (1838-1903), who filed his claim in 1865, and William Goodnight (1834-1909) and family, who arrived in 1868. Today's Main Street in Battle Ground marked an informal boundary line between the communities of Dublin and Maple Grove.

To the northeast of today's Battle Ground, near Battle Ground Lake (in the vicinity of Bells Mountain), the earliest settlers included George Miller, Robert Cresap, Jack Beam, William Palmer, and Joseph Woodin. This area shared the Battle Ground name for years, then briefly was known as Old Battle Ground, and is now called Crawford.

The collection shows that there were Swedish farmers living near Mt. Bell (Bells Mountain) in the 1880s. By 1909 the Swedish Land & Colonization Company purchased land from Weyerhaeuser Timber Company for "colonization." The company advertised the land with flyers written in Swedish in urban centers across the country and in Sweden. They named the area Venersborg. Before the colonization the area was called by various names: The Colony, Alpine and Bell's Mountain were used.

Photographs are mounted on the front and back of prints of USPR Meterology and Geology survey plates. The photographs have captions on them written in Swedish and include named Swedish American settlers. Notes on some photographs indicate "our farm" or " our cabin" but there is no identification of the actual family's name. Although most of the captions on the photographs in this collection refer to locations near Mt. Bell, the name does not exist on any current maps. There has never been an official listing for Mt. Bell, so it is probable that "Mt. Bell" was a local term. In 1955, Bells Mountain was added to the United States Geological Survey topographical maps.