[4][5] The original site of the community was at a toll gate and traveler's rest stop at the summit of the stagecoach road from the Willamette Valley to the Oregon Coast on the Tillamook-Yamhill county line.

[4][6] At one time the community at the summit also had a hotel, a store, a sawmill, a barrel and stave factory, a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, and a campground.

[4] About a half mile from the current site of Dolph at the junction of OR 22 and OR 130, there was another toll gate and the blacksmith shop of George Baxter, who maintained the road that followed the Little Nestucca River.

[6] By the 1970s, nothing remained at the old town site but an apple orchard and a small cemetery on a hilltop a half a mile away.

There is also a historic locale named Dolph in Polk County; it was a station on the Southern Pacific Railroad.