The town of Salem is now growing. It has the advantage of a splendid water-power, called Mill Creek, which is turned to good account before it reaches the Willamette just below the city. On it are placed the Pioneer Oil-Mills, where linseed-oil and linseed-cake are produced, of excellent quality and moderate price; also a large building now used both as an implement-factory and as a flour-mill; this has lately changed hands, and it is too soon yet to speak of its success. Below this are placed the "Salem Flour-Mills" of Kinney Brothers & Co. Their brand is recognized and approved in all the markets of the world--as it ought to be, if the best of wheat turned into the best of flour, and its sale honestly and intelligently carried out, can command success. The mills are fine buildings, fitted with the most modern and powerful machinery, and stand just on the edge of the Willamette, with a dock where the river-steamers can deliver wheat and receive flour. I believe that this last fall of 1881 they converted 600,000 bushels of wheat into flour. A switch from the Oregon and California Railroad runs from the main line to the mills on the other side, and is proving an immense convenience to the city generally as well as to the mills. The steamboat pauses on its upward journey at Buena Vista, to take in and deliver freight for the pottery there, already extensive, and which by the excellence of its productions demonstrates that it only needs further capital and enlarged business relations to do an important share of the trade of the coast. The glaze on the ware is very good, made from a mineral earth found in the bank of the Willamette at Corvallis. After passing the mouth of the Santiam, the most considerable tributary of the Willamette, we stop at Albany. This is one of the best situated and most progressive towns in the State. Although with a little less than two thousand inhabitants at present, it has all the enterprise and "go" of a town in Europe of five times that number. There are here also three large flour-mills, the brands of some of which are known and prized in Liverpool, to which port cargoes are frequently sent. Albany has a lumber-mill, foundry, twine-mill, and scutching-mill, fruit-drying works, sash and door factory, and soon will have woolen-mills also. The making of the place is the water-power of the Santiam River, brought in a canal for thirteen miles through the level prairie-land, but rushing through the town and supplying the mills and factories with a flow and force of water sufficient for double as many works as at present use it. The town is supplied with water for domestic purposes from the same source, of clearness and purity that it is hard to equal.