Adair Village

By Richard Engeman

The city of Adair Village is located in Benton County about seven miles north of Corvallis along Highway 99W. The name is derived from Camp Adair, a World War II training camp that encompassed more than 50,000 acres. The camp hosted as many as 45,000 troops and military personnel between 1942 and its decommissioning in 1946. A U. S. Air Force radar station operated on the site of the former camp headquarters from 1957 until 1969, and the Air Force facilities, along with a few surviving wartime structures, became the nucleus of Adair Village.

Residents of the defunct military base successfully formed their own city, which was incorporated in 1976 with a land area of about 40 acres. A few structures remain from Camp Adair; City Hall was housed in one until a fire destroyed it in 2003. One of the original fire stations, owned by Adair Village, served as a market and pub, but a fire damaged the building in 2006 and it is being rebuilt. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has a maintenance facility in Adair Village, and the office of the South Willamette Watershed District is located in the town.

The 1980 census recorded a population of 589, a figure that had declined to 536 by 2000. Since that time, residential construction, spurred by the operations of Hewlett-Packard a few miles to the south and a growing population of commuters who work in Corvallis or Albany, has raised the population to 994 (2020).

  • Camp Adair Hospital unit, 1940s.

    Oreg. State Univ. Archives, Harriet's Coll., HC0816

  • Adair Air Force Station, 1960.

    Oreg. State Univ. Archives, Alumni Assoc. Photo Coll., P017:3540

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Further Reading

City of Adair Village. www.adairvillage.org/

McArthur, Lewis A. and Lewis L. McArthur. Oregon Geographic Names, 7th Ed. Portland, Ore.: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2003.