David Hill Circuit pt1

Starting from Forest Grove (Thatcher Park), I head north on Thatcher Road for two miles to reach...Thatcher.

The Thatchers were other early pioneers (their son married one of the David's daughters) and did make a land claim in the area that became the town.

Thatcher briefly had a post office in the early in the 1890s. Now, it's a series of small farms.

The 1940's map shows Thatcher Schoolhouse but it's gone by 1979. I thought this building was the remnants but I'm told it's the old grange hall. 

I head west and uphill on Hillside Road.

Hillside

As of the start of 2025, I had never been to Hillside. It's 10 months later and I've biked through four times. It's that good! There's three paved routes to the community and all are scenic beauties with a moderate, rewarding climb. A few steeper gravel options on the north face provide alternatives for more adventurous riders.

Both approaches from the east are through rolling hills of farms and hazelnut orchards. I passed the nut drying facility, in full production that day. 

Hillside is a community at the junction of Hillside and Clapshaw Roads. The unincorporated town is aptly named: it's neither the top nor the bottom but the side of David Hill. 

There used to be a church (the site is now an abandoned pit, after an electrical fire). The old schoolhouse now serves as the church meeting place and cemetery is still active, surrounded by a cluster of rural properties.

Most cyclists I see make a loop by going up Hillside, then coasting down Clapshaw toward Kansas City, but I have something more ambitious planned today. I continue up Clapshaw Hill Rd to a small pass in the ridgeline.

From there, it's a steep descent down to Gales Creek, and the next destination.

Balm Grove (Historic Joppa)

In the 1800s, there used to be a sizeable community at Balm Grove. It wasn't called Balm Grove then, it was called Joppa. Of all the lost pioneer communities I've learned of in WashCo, Joppa is one I know the least about. Joppa filed to have a post office in 1874. Sleuths online found newspaper articles saying that it was opened for a few years.

I only know the approximate location of Joppa because the first post master at Peak saw it fit to include in the hand-drawn map for that post office application:

I don't know what became of Joppa. Like many other pioneer communities, it may have simply vanished in favor of more accessible farmlands. It was probably a logging camp, an intentionally short-lived community. Once the immediate area was deforested, the timber companies moved on.

When development shows up again on the map, it's been rebranded as Balm Grove. I don't know if it fits the formal definition of a community. Balm Grove never had a post office. Nor church, school, general store, cemetery or any of the other hallmarks of communal living as far as I can tell. 

It was primarily a swimming hole formed by a three-foot concrete dam. I see references to the dam getting built in 1936, but also find newspaper advertisements from the 1920s so it may have been a recreation site even before the dam was built. It had a dance hall, tavern, and picnic area. Balm Grove is not on the 1941 map, but appears in 1956 where it remains to this day.

Balm Grove remained an incredibly popular weekend night spot until waning in the 1960s and finally closing in the 1990s. In the 2010s, the site was purchased by Tree for All and the abandoned dam was removed in 2022, restoring miles of waterways to migratory fish.

The old tavern still sits boarded up and site access is restricted. I work my way up Grove Loop to photograph the approximate location of the dam from upstream.

Grove loop is a small triangle of roads off the Gales Creek highway. It's a series of smallish rural properties (I don't like calling them "farms" when most appear to have little or no agricultural output).