08/28/2026
Aurora, Oregon’s Mystery Grave
History is hiding beneath your feet on the outskirts of Aurora, near the former town of Champoeg. With trails, fields and the Willamette River connecting them, it’s helpful to understand their unique and also shared backgrounds, going way back.
Champoeg was located on Aurora’s doorstep and considered a lifeline, connecting Aurora colonists to the outside world, with both postal service and river commerce. Land claims stretched between the two settlements, plus Aurora's early mills served the surrounding countryside, so the communities shared a tightly connected frontier economy. Aurora survived and Champoeg essentially vanished, yet the two towns weren’t simply neighbors…they were interdependent.
But there’s a mystery around these parts that few have ever heard. Deep inside these woods is a clue. That’s because there’s a grave here, with very little explanation. Most people would ask “Who was this person and why is this headstone located here, in the middle of a forest with its own trail?” A little digging reveals both the story of a young woman living nearby and one of the strangest archaeological searches in Oregon history.
Her name was Kitty Newell and much of her life remains a mystery. Kitty was a Native American woman from the Nez Perce tribe who married Robert “Doc” Newell, a fur trader and pioneer, helping establish Oregon's early provisional government. Robert & Kitty were part of the Champoeg community on Aurora’s western edge. And for an sense of just how close one Newell home was from today’s current Champoeg Park, it’s practically throwing distance from the entrance.
Robert claimed 640 acres along the Willamette in 1844 and helped plat the town of Champoeg. So Kitty Newell’s story unfolds on the shared French Prairie landscape around Aurora’s west boundary. A dozen years later, the Aurora Colony was founded. But in December, 1845 while still in her twenties, Kitty died. She left behind five children and was buried at Champoeg. Today, there’s a marker bearing her name and Oregon State Parks maintain a short trail leading to the Kitty Newell gravesite.
But there was a problem.
Overgrown homestead terrain, missing early markers, and conflicting historical records created uncertainty about the exact location of Kitty Newell's grave. Some records suggested one location. Later accounts pointed elsewhere. To get a sense of what researchers were dealing with, a walk of the area explains a lot. That’s because upon entering the woods in these parts, it’s easy to get disoriented as one tree starts looking like another. So over time, no one could say for certain specifically where Kitty Newell had been laid to rest. More than 170 years after her death, historians and archaeologists could not say with confidence that the marker stood directly above her burial. So while a burial area for Kitty had a marker, evidence didn’t give archaeologists enough confidence that it was sited accurately.
But why didn't officials simply excavate to confirm whether Kitty was buried there? They chose a non-invasive approach, since the site lies inside a protected historic area and potential human gravesites require greater caution than ordinary archaeological features.
Then in 2017, something unusual happened. They brought in specially trained detection dogs, capable of confirming the faint chemical scent left by burials…even after centuries underground. Their trainers explained human remains leave a preserved scent signature that dogs can locate from graves long after all visible evidence has disappeared. Three dogs and their handlers arrived at Champoeg from California and Washington.
Their assignment? Investigate possible burial locations, including the area where Kitty Newell was believed to have been buried. So in the twenty first century, people were literally walking dogs across our local soil, asking them to provide the location of a woman who died in 1845. What would happen?
The dogs worked methodically, moving back and forth with their noses to the ground. One border collie, Berkeley, stopped and gave an alert, with a handler marking the spot. By the end of the search, the dogs had narrowed down an area believed to contain Kitty Newell's original burial site. Their findings added yet another piece to a mystery that had endured for more than 170 years.
Yet the search itself was noteworthy, generations after Kitty’s passing. First came landscape changes, along with a record area flood followed by conflicting records. Then finally, almost two centuries later, searchers return to the landscape with specially trained dogs, hoping to recover knowledge that time had nearly erased.
For many, the exact location of Kitty Newell's grave matters less than not forgetting her story. Kitty Newell's story reminds us that traces of the past surround us, even when they can no longer be seen.
Sometimes history survives in memories. Sometimes it survives in documents. And sometimes it survives in the ground itself—waiting for someone to come looking. Perhaps the most compelling part is that we can still walk here. So at Champoeg, you can follow the Kitty Newell Trail. And then you can stand beside her headstone and look out across the same area she knew nearly two centuries ago.
Here rests a young woman whose life was largely forgotten. Then, nearly two centuries later, the decision was made to find her. And that’s one of the most compelling stories of all.
