Famous dance hall hosted Berry, Cash, many more

By Finn J.D. John
August 5, 2012

HALFWAY BETWEEN ALBANY and Lebanon on Highway 20, not far from the bottomlands of the South Santiam River, there’s a little store called the Cottonwoods Market.

If you should find yourself driving by with a few minutes to spare, you may be tempted to stop for a snack. If you do, pause for a moment on the porch of that market and look across the street at the dusty, overgrown vacant lot on the other side.

That’s the former site of the Cottonwoods Ballroom.

A legendary dance hall

The Cottonwoods Ballroom was probably the most important entertainment venue between Portland and Eugene, a kind of first-among-equals of the dance hall-community centers that once peppered the Willamette Valley. The list of acts that have performed there reads like an excerpt from some kind of multi-ethnic Who’s Who of 20th-century musicians: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, the Nat King Cole Trio, Duke Ellington, Sons of the Pioneers, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, Tex Ritter, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash.

“Big bands, such as Fats Domino and Johnny Cash, made appearances at Cottonwoods in the middle of the week between gigs in Portland and Eugene,” explains historian and Western Oregon University grad student Toni Rush, on the blog she’s created to memorialize and document the Cottonwoods Ballroom.

There’s another name you’ll hear mentioned as having played at the Cottonwoods, too: Elvis Presley. A number of mid-valley residents have recalled conversations in which his name came up as a performer at The Cottonwoods, long before he was famous. The problem is, we can’t be sure, because firsthand accounts are lacking — “I saw Elvis at The Cottonwoods in 1946,” that sort of thing — or advertising.

Historian Jim Creighton is frankly skeptical. “Elvis sightings at Cottonwoods are fairly common, and completely mythical,” he said. “I’ve done much research trying to find the truth and everything points to him not being there.”

The same is true for rumors of a show by country music legend Hank Williams, he added.

The Depression years

The ballroom got its start in 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, when Gladys and Harry Wiley built it as a performance venue and community center, located at an important crossroads among half a dozen small and medium-size Willamette Valley communities.

Right from the start, the Cottonwoods was different. Its name was almost certainly intended to evoke Harlem’s famous Cotton Club; although it was a different kind of venue, the Cottonwoods quickly developed a reputation for booking spectacular African-American performers.

One key way the Cottonwoods differed from the Cotton Club was the audience. The Wileys aimed to provide a family-friendly atmosphere there … sort of. So the Cotton Club’s famous “tall, tan and terrific” dancing girls were not a part of the Cottonwoods scene, and neither were the club’s alcoholic beverages. The Cottonwoods was strictly alcohol-free.

However, patrons were welcome to crack a bottle in the parking lot just outside, and many did just that — like tailgaters at a Beavers game. And after Prohibition was repealed, the Wileys officially opened the place across the street — next door to today’s Cottonwoods Market — as a tavern (it had probably been an unofficial tavern for some time, though).

The war years, and Camp Adair

In 1939, the Wileys got divorced and Harry left; Gladys remained in charge of the place. Another change at around that time was the installation of a new dance floor, made of clear pine. Creighton told Rush that dancers felt as if they were “dancing on springboards,” and as a result they stayed up and active later into the night.

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Then, as the Second World War started looming on the horizon, the U.S. Army built and opened Camp Adair — Oregon’s second-largest city, a massive Army base located about 20 miles away from the Cottonwoods. Being an Army base, it of course lacked anything like the Cottonwoods, so the 40,000 servicemen stationed there piled into old jalopies and drove across the river to the ballroom to party.

“One person remembered how it was expensive to get a taxi cab so often the men would combine their change and jump onto an old Model T, filling the car and leaving men hanging off of the running boards on their way to Cottonwoods,” Rush writes. “The images of men hanging off of the running boards on their way to a performance of Hazel Fisher and Her All Girl Band, the most popular of all the bands during the war, is enough to make anyone laugh.”

At the end of the evening, the men would pile back onto the old flivver again — usually pretty drunk by this time — and straggle back to base. Gladys Wiley actually instituted a curfew at the Cottonwoods to help encourage them to get back on time.

The golden age: 1945-1960

The Cottonwoods really came into its own, and made a nationwide name for itself among performers, in the years after the war. That’s when the really big names — Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash — came to play.

But in 1960, Gladys closed the dance hall for reasons related to the declining health of a loved one, and the golden age was over. A few months after she did this, the dance hall reopened under new management, but apparently the magic was gone, because it was closed again before the end of 1961.

It straggled on for a few years, closing and reopening a few more times as different people tried to make a go of it. For some time in the 1970s, it was probably Oregon’s most rural disco nightclub. Eventually, in the 1980s, it became a bingo hall and community center.

The end came in the early 1990s, when a windstorm tore the roof up and ruined the structure. It was demolished, the lot leveled, and all that remained was a rusty sign by the roadside, where it stayed for years before finally being removed.

The Cottonwoods today

Locals still remember the Cottonwoods, and use it as a point of reference (“turn left at the Cottonwoods”) even though it’s been gone for almost 20 years. With it is gone an era in Oregon history, one in which dance halls hummed and throbbed with lively music on a Saturday night and neighbors met each other for pot-luck socials on a Sunday afternoon. That spirit is mostly a memory, and the best we can do is hope it comes back someday to reanimate those rural community centers and grange halls that are quietly fading away, or have already vanished, in places like Riverside and Crowfoot and St. Paul.

Maybe if it does, the Cottonwoods will be rebuilt.

Historian Creighton will be ready if it is. He’s the proud owner of a small pile of lumber — the last few pieces of the dance floor installed in the late 1930s.

“I talked to the guy who tore the building down and found out who bought the dance floor,” he told Lebanon Express reporter Matt DeBow. “The guy who bought the flooring still had a little bit left stored in a barn. I just could not resist buying the last bit of it.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: The version of this article published in the newspapers contained an error; it said the Cottonwoods closed in 1959 because of Gladys's declining health, when in fact she closed it in 1960 to focus on helping a loved one whose health was declining. This article has been changed to reflect this new information, and I apologize to anyone confused or misinformed as a result of the error.

 (Sources: Rush, Toni. Albany Cottonwoods, https://albanycottonwoods.wordpress.com ; Pacific Northwest Bands, www.pnwbands.com; The Lebanon Express, 7-04-2012; correspondence with Jim Creighton)

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