Dotting Yamhill County’s 700 square miles of rolling hills and lush fields are ghost towns galore. Communities probably unknown to you, but that served a purpose.

Our county’s prize ghost towns are Wheatland and Saint Joseph, with Pike and Whiteson as contenders. Lambert Florin in “Oregon Ghost Towns” defines a ghost town as a “shadowy semblance of its former self” and, in that respect, Pike and Whiteson qualify.

Mining is responsible for many of Oregon’s outstanding ghost towns, but not in Yamhill County. A railroad helped create the ghost of Saint Joseph. That town sprang up in McMinnville’s front yard, a few miles northeast, and planned to outdo its rival.

Founded by Ben Holladay in 1872, Saint Joseph was terminus for the county’s first railroad. Its plat included 74 blocks of 10 lots each. The town grew and, at one time, had 150 houses. Stage coaches from McMinnville, Dayton and Lafayette met the train at Saint Joseph, where a two-story hotel provided lodging for East Coast passengers coming to buy land.

Developers planned to extend the railway down the valley, but money ran out. For eight years the train ended at Saint Joseph where turntables headed it back to Portland. Rival McMinnville then snared the railroad “plum.”

Circa 1900, Saint Joseph had another chance to escape ghostliness. Two companies were formed to sell land there. And during President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the federal government bought some 1,500 acres in the Saint Joseph area for resettlement purposes. Acreage mostly was divided into small dairy farms. WPA workers built houses, garages, barns on the plots that sold for $100 an acre.

Today remnants of Saint Joseph are few. The area is now known as St. Joe.

Someday, as you wait to cross the Willamette at Wheatland Ferry, you may well may glimpse ghostly apparitions here where Daniel Matheny laid out a town. Originally called Atcheson, it became known as “Wheatland” because of the vast quantities of wheat shipped from the site.

By 1867, Wheatland had a post office. By 1881, its population was 319. It had at least 15 businesses, including drug store, flour mill, large warehouses, and the Occidental and Wheatland House Hotels.

Fires, floods and the coming of the railroads brought Wheatland’s ghosts. By 1915, the golden city of wheat had population of only 85.

No remnants of this ghost town remain for tourists to explore.

But Pike, in the Coast Range foothills, is a different story. If for no other reason, tourists may browse its historic cemetery — and especially the marker of W.T. Hines (and wife, Elizabeth). William T., born May 19, 1803, died in 1847 on the Oregon Trail at Emigrant Crossing, Snake River. Legend has it that a crude coffin was built and William was carried by covered wagon to Oregon and buried at Pike.

Pike was a busy logging community, but misfortune came. The Tillamook Fire burned much of the community’s timber supply and Carlton and Coast Railroad was dismantled in 1939-40, severing Pike’s lifelines.

Railroads were responsible for Whiteson’s glory days — and for its demise. Founded by Henry White in 1889, it once had post office, school, newspapers and businesses. Here, the narrow gauge line crossed the standard gauge line. Travelers stayed overnight at the Whiteson Hotel. When the railroads left, Whiteson napped on.

All across Yamhill County, little settlements galore have tried, never made it to greatness, and became “ghostlets.” Such as Mount Hood. At the east foot of Amity Hills in 1854, a post office by that name was established on John Richardson’s claim — with view of that mountain top far in the distance. The view apparently persuaded few to take up residence there.

Puckerville, in Moore’s Valley area, tried also to become a town. In the late 1880s and ’90s, Puckerville items in Yamhill County newspapers reported talk of a new store “in our berg,” the organizing of a literary society, and this confident item: “Puckerville has more get up and go than any other town its size in Yamhill County.” But Puckerville’s “get up and go” never “got up and grew.”

Bellevue was referred to in 1886 by one publication, as a “thriving valley town with population of 50, plus 30 school children.” The community of Manila, located on headquarters of Muddy Creek, had dreams for a time. It was so named because of the Philippine’s Manila that was much in the news then because of the Spanish American War. The post office for Yamhill County’s Manila, which opened in 1898, lasted only about six months.

In 1898, about five miles northeast of Yamhill, our county also had a Dewey, named for Admiral George Dewey. South of Dayton, Hopewell, a community that never gives up hope, had a post office in 1897, but it closed in 1903. And Briedwell, two miles west of Amity, boasted of a school, but its post office lasted only from 1887 to 1888.

So many other hopeful communities sprang up, only to become “ghosts,” such as Chase, Crawford, and Gopher Valley, which acquired a post office in 1899. Larch on Trask Toll Road, 17 miles west of Yamhill, made brief history; and Roberts, in north Yamhill County, took off with a post office in 1892. That was about the last that was heard of Roberts.

Grand Island, one of the largest islands in the Willamette, made a try at greatness and had a school for some 40 years. But when the school consolidated with Dayton, Grand Island instead made history with lush crops.

Springbrook, in the beginning, was called Hoskins, and had its first post office in 1893. It’s now taking off with a fine new hostelry. Ghosts are scuttling away from there.

Although you probably won’t take visiting relatives on tours of Yamhill County ghost towns, these communities with their spectral pasts contributed much to the county’s beginnings, and helped to mold its fruitful future.

Elaine Rohse is a longtime McMinnville resident who shares a love of traveling and golf with her husband, Homer.