The community was established as "Venner's Villas" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a land entrepreneur named J. C. Lanerberg purchased land from various sources (the government, the railroad, and other landowners). He divided the land into lots, and marketed it in large urban areas throughout the United States, highlighting its resemblance to rural Sweden. The flyers were written in Swedish so, predictably, the first settlers who arrived in the early 1900s were mostly of Swedish ancestry. The growth of nearby Vancouver and Portland led to an influx of new residents in the 1960s.