Blooming (Cornelius), Washington Co., Oregon

The first Volga Germans, about seventeen families, arrived in Portland in 1881 after spending several years in Rush and Barton Counties in Kansas between 1875 and 1878. Most were from the colonies of Neu-Yagodnaya-Polyana, Schöntal, and Schönfeld, which were daughter colonies of Yagodnaya-Polyana and neighboring Pobochnaya. The group obtained special emigrant fares through the Union Pacific Railroad and Oregon Steam Navigation Company to travel to Portland where they had heard good farmland was available.

Although most of these families decided to move on to the Palouse country of Eastern Washington, several families remained in Oregon and chose to settle to the west of the city in the Tualatin Valley where they could continue their career as farmers. They joined other German families in the area and founded a community called Blooming.

A post office was opened in 1895 to serve the neighborhood of Blooming. The original one was housed in the parsonage of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, moving to another area home in 1900. In 1994, this post office was disbanded. Little remains to indicate where the community of Blooming once existed just south of the town of Cornelius. The cemetery of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, located about a mile south of the church, bears the name of Blooming Cemetery.