I feel really sad about this Washburne Wayside selloff -- With those great trees and diverse landscape, it's a beautiful natural forested  island in the middle of the agricultural  fields, and used to be one of my favorite spots to stop and take a break with my dog Koshka when driving between Eugene and Corvallis--how we loved that  great trail that ran around the periphery of the park...
It's also a significant historic site, and in 1996 when we commemorated the   Sesquicentennial of the 1846 Applegate Trail we chose that as a very special place to install historic signage depicting this protective grove  as a historic resting place  as well as  interpreting the  terrible struggles the first pioneers faced when crossing the flooded Long Tom River down the trail a few miles.
When the state ran short of funding and closed the park a few years ago we transferred that historic AT signage to the South Benton Co. museum in Monroe, right at the Long Tom crossing.
But I still miss Washburne.