In Oregon City, sadness and disbelief intertwine

People write messages on a memorial on a fence surrounding Weaver's home.

(CNN) -- Along a 50-foot chain-link fence on South Beavercreek Road in Oregon City, Oregon, is an impromptu memorial of flowers, cards and notes that people are leaving for the memory of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis.

The fence around the rental house of Ward Weaver -- suspect in the girls' deaths -- is also being filled with balloons, Teddy bears and poems in the latest makeshift memorial to tragedy.

The town of 15,000 –- the community where I grew up –- is at the center of the latest chapter in this year's ongoing story of missing children, some kidnapped and later returned to their families, some found dead.

Over the weekend investigators found two sets of remains on Weaver's property. They have been identified as those of Miranda and Ashley.

Gary Ross, pastor of Oregon City's United Methodist Church, said people as far away as Seattle, Washington, have left mementos along the fence, near the apartment complex where Ashley and Miranda lived.

"This has very much affected the Pacific Northwest," he said. "This is something that happens in other places, not here."

That sentiment mirrors current and former residents of Oregon City, including myself. Bad things just never happened in Oregon City.

"Oregon City isn't really a small town, but things like this just don't happen here," said 19-year-old Justin Smith, who works across the street from the chain-link fence memorial. "Everybody I know talks about the case. It's pretty hard to describe the feelings here. We're all sickened by it."

Located 15 miles south of Portland at the junction of the Willamette and Clackamas rivers, Oregon City is a community that prides itself on being an atypical bedroom community, one that looks to its historical past to cling to a small-town present.

A museum in the shape of a giant Conestoga wagon marks the end of the Oregon Trail in the community. The mascot for the town's lone high school is a pioneer.

In the 19th century the area was a meeting place for Indians, hunters, trappers and voyagers for John McLoughlin's Hudson's Bay Company. Established as a lumber mill at the bottom of a bluff near Willamette Falls, Oregon City became the first incorporated city west of the Mississippi River and was later designated Oregon's territorial capital.

Today, Oregon City is populated by a mix of longtime residents and people who have moved there during the Portland metropolitan area's period of rapid growth in the 1990s. The town is the seat of Clackamas County, and much of its employment is tied to government, as well as the paper mills along the Willamette River.

Ashley and Miranda grew up on the third, or top level of Oregon City's bluff, an area residents call the Hilltop. Their apartment complex home -- just two miles from the property my family lived and sold Christmas trees on -- was part of the new growth to the area as it became more suburbanized in the 1990s.

Carol Kemhus, principal of Ogden Middle School and active in the effort earlier this year to search for Ashley and Miranda, said 500 adults and children attended a counseling session Sunday to help parents and kids deal with the two girls' deaths.

"Right now this community is hurting," Kemhus said. "This has been very traumatic for parents and children. It's an eerie feeling here right now, with the reality setting in."

On the second tier of the town's bluff and next to the John McLoughlin House sits the Rev. Ross' church.

The church has directly experienced the tragedy of Ashley and Miranda's deaths, he said: Teachers who are members of the church taught the girls and the girls' mothers. Members of the congregation knew the girls well, Ross said.

On Sunday, Ross led a silent prayer and moment of reflection for his congregation. "It was emotional, a very tearful experience," he said.

"There's sort of a feeling of relief in a way, that it's over, that it's safe now for the kids," Ross said. "But there's also sadness, knowing this is reality, believing that this guy [Weaver] could have done such a thing.

"You don't get over that very quickly."

-- Kevin Drew is editor of CNN.com's Law Section.