The Monteith House is the oldest surviving frame house in Albany, built in 1849 for the brothers who founded the city. The simple two-storey structure, now a museum, gives a grounded sense of what domestic life looked like for early settlers in the Willamette Valley. The furnishings are period-appropriate and the interpretation is honest about the difficulty of frontier life.
The house sits in the Monteith Historic District, surrounded by later Victorian buildings that demonstrate how quickly Albany grew in the decades after the Monteith brothers arrived. The contrast between this spare settler's house and the elaborate Italianate mansions a few blocks away tells the story of the town's rapid prosperity as an agricultural hub. Open for tours through the summer season.