PNW Photoblog

Daffodil

Old Pickup Truck

Sunny February Day in Portland. This was sitting downtown. If anyone knows who owns it, I’d like to get them a copy of this picture.

Drift Creek Covered Bridge

This is the rebuilt Drift Creek Covered Bridge just outside of the Lincoln City. The original one fell down in 1997. The owners of the property here were able to use timbers from the old one to build the new one in 2001 with a lot of help from the community. The property was for sale at the time of this picture, but I do not know if it’s been purchased or not.

Public Market

Pike’s Place Public Market, the second, smaller sign. Extremely early in the morning, the vendors hadn’t even started showing up yet.

Rural Barn

I often wonder about the history behind barns. Despite being built poorly (at least perceived that way,) they seem to last forever. This barn could be 50 years old. It could be a hundred with multiple additions over the years as the farm grew.

Mt Hood in the clouds

Just calmly driving along a road I’ve not traveled in years. When to my delight Mt Hood peeked out between the trees, covered as it still was with clouds of all descriptions.

Beach Photos

Yaquina Head Light house in fog

And just down sunset.

Pikes Place Market Store Window

I’ve always loved looking in this store window at Pike’s Place Market. No clue what the store name is, but it’s the one with the window full of these little rock miniature figurines. I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought anything here, but as this store has been here as long as I can remember, they must be doing well.

Columbia River Gorge

The Columbia River Gorge has a huge impact on Portland’s weather. As a huge conduit between the Western wet side of Oregon to the Eastern, High Desert side through the Cascade Mountains, our quickly shifting and frequently erratic weather patterns are almost totally to blame on the Gorge.

As cloud cover, ground temperature and the amount of snow cause the air to warm on one side of the mountains or the other, the wind starts picking up through the narrow walls of the river.

With normal winds in the 10-20mph range and gusts 60-80+mph. In the winter this can cause severe icy driving conditions and frequently closes I-84 through the Gorge down to all traffic, including trains.

Here is a typical view. Looking West from Vista House Viewpoint at about 8 am in the morning. Very cloudy and drizzly.

Looking East from the same spot, a bit of clearness in the air. The wind is pushing the clouds away. Further east a mile or two it’s already sunny and coming up on the low 60’s. In an hour, low 70’s and clear or partially cloudy throughout the entire Portland Area.

History of Orenco Oregon

The history of Orenco was tied to the history of the Oregon Nursery Company. The town arose as a company town to provide services for the companies workers and their families. But the down fall of the company eventually led to the downfall of the town itself.

Before 1908 the current location of Orenco were land claims cleared by Chinese laborers hired by local farmers. Depending on the source, the Oregon Nursery Company either bought 640 acres in 1896, or 170 acres in May 1906. My guess is that they actually did both as the company eventually had 1200 total acres in the area.

The Oregon Nursery Company had been founded in 1867 as the Capital City Nursery in Salem Oregon. Archibald McGill, and Malcolm McDonald, both Canadian Scottish immigrants, purchased the company in 1892. In 1896 it had changed it’s name to reflect it’s expanding business. This leads me to believe that the purchase of 640 acres in the same year is correct and probably provoked the name change.

The Oregon Nursery Company built a wooden building that covered two acres, the largest of it’s kind in the United States at the time. It’s use was to be a packing shed, but it saw use as the Washington County Fairgrounds due to it’s size. A fire that destroyed the packing plant at the Salem location in 1905 caused the entire company to be moved to the new location.

In 1908 the town of Orenco was platted and the name first created by a contraction of the company name. By this time the Oregon Nursery Company had acquired enough land to expand their holdings to 1200 acres. 1100 acres was used for nursery stock, the remaining acres was most likely dedicated to the new town. The town was built to house the Hungarian immigrant workers that the company sponsored. They worked for the Company, and lived in the town. In the same year the Oregon Electric Railway finished their Portland to Forest Grove line with one of the stops being in the newly created Orenco. The timing is a bit of a coincidence so plans for the town and the stop had to be in the works for some time before that.

1909 saw an official Post Office established to serve the Hungarian workers and their families. The first and only church, the Orenco Presbyterian Church was also founded in the same year. By 1910 the town’s population reached 500 people. The number of wooden structures in town made a fire department necessary and thus one staffed by volunteers was created on December 6th 1910.

On January 6, 1913 Orenco citizens voted to incorporate the town. This brought on the additional necessity of a City Hall which was completed in 1914, although some sources say it was completed as early as 1912. The town included 169 children enrolled in the local school, a blacksmith shop, ice cream parlor, hardware store and lumber yard, two grocery stores, and even a printing press where H. V. Meade started printing the Orenco Herald in 1914. The town even had all the “modern conveniences” such as water, sewer, telephone, electric lighting and the required 25 piece band.

1913 saw the Oregon Nursery Company’s peak year. The company started increasing production so that they could break into the European Market. The unfortunate start of World War I in 1916 put a permanent stop to these plans. The cost of keeping so much nursery stock bankrupted the company and it ended up dissolving completely in 1927.

The town itself managed to hang on until 1938 when the City Government was dissolved by vote of the town’s remaining citizens. But Orenco’s story was still far from complete. After the urbanization move of the Post World War II era, Orenco remained a planned community. Cul-De-Sacs and single family dwellings littered the former nursery lands.

This cycle still continues today, although with the re-introduction of rail service to the area in the 1998 expansion of Trimet’s light rail service Orenco is now more of a city then it was in 1913. The town has not reincorporated, but several of the old buildings still stand. Mixed in among them is a huge number of new homes integrated into what is being called a “Mixed Use Center.” These are buildings with stores on the ground floor and apartments or condominiums on the top floors.

Future Orenco continues to look bright as companies such as Intel continue to build there. Orenco’s current population and economic diversity is far greater then it’s founders could have imagined.