OregonScape

Russian railway commission at the west portal of the Great Northern Ry. Co. 8 mile Cascade tunnel, March 11, 1930.

In the late 1920s, the then Soviet Union began a program to modernize its railroad system, reported to cover about 50,000 miles. The centerpiece of the first Five-Year Plan was the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, constructed in 1926 to 1931. The Soviets used many American railroad building methods and construction equipment, and dozens of American workers were employed by Stalin’s government for railroad projects.

Near the end of the Plan, a commission of twenty men and one woman came from the Soviet Union to inspect railroads and operations around the United States, spending three months touring the country and looking at rail lines, equipment, and building techniques. They arrived in the Northwest in 1930 to study the Great Northern Railway and ride the Southern Pacific into California. On March 11, 1930, the group stopped at the west portal of the Cascade Tunnel in Stevens Pass, Washington, to pose for this photograph by Lee Pickett. The man standing on the coupling in the middle of the image is probably Daniil Sulimov, Deputy Commissar of Railroads and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

The group included P.S. Shushkov, chief of inspection of transportation; D.C. Ulanov-Zineviev, president of Doneta Railroad; N.F. Cosorea, chief engineer of the bridge bureau of the commissariat for transportation; S.V. Chernov; K.V. Lauer; V. Bratin; L. Genes; B. Dokukin; M.A. Abramov, director of the Kazan railroad; V. Haritonov, Moscow-Kursk railroad; S.A. Vassiliev, consulting engineer; W. Ladejinsky, interpreter; A.A. Terpeugov; A.M.J. Dmitriersky; S.G. Phillpoff; and Mrs. F.S. Markova, secretary to the commission. Unfortunately, the newspapers did not identify specific individuals in any of the photographs.

In turn, Jan Ernestowitsch Rudsutak, Chief Commissar of Transportation and vice president of the Council of People’s Commissars of RSFSR, invited several U.S. industry leaders, including Ralph Budd, president of the Great Northern, to the Soviet Union to inspect the modernized system. Budd planned a three-month inspection tour and vacation beginning in June 1930.

The modernization efforts paid off for the Soviet Union during World War II — the railroads helped move troops, equipment, and ordnance. Two of the officials primarily involved in the 1930 inspection tours, however, did not survive to see the railroads aid in the war effort: In company with hundreds of thousands of others from the Communist Party and the government, Sulimov and Rudsutak were executed in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.

— Mikki Tint, former special collections librarian, OHS Research Library

Corner of the Oregon State Motor Association sign department

The Oregonian, December 1, 1929, bb008970

Local and state transportation agencies erect signs marking city streets, country roads, and interstate highways, but in the early days of the automobile era, such signage was not supplied by the government.

The Portland Automobile Club was organized in 1905, the same year that the first transcontinental automobile race ended at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland. Club members spent their Sunday afternoons on organized auto tours to their clubhouse outside Portland, and sponsored races to show off their latest mechanical wonders. In 1907, the club spent $1500 erecting directional signs along the roads of Portland and Multnomah County. The club later changed its name to the Oregon State Motor Association, and the membership appropriation rose to $3,000 to continue the signing project. By 1927, every important intersection or turn in Multnomah County had been marked.

In 1913, the legislature created the State Highway Department and its overseer, the Oregon Highway Commission. Although the public agencies concentrated on paving Oregon’s muddy roads, they also contributed funds to the auto club’s sign project. By 1930, the combined funds allowed signs to be installed in eighteen counties around the state.

In this 1929 photograph, club employee Charles Heaney works in the storage area filled with signs soon to be distributed around the state. Heaney was an accomplished painter and printmaker whose work is still exhibited in many Northwest museums and in the historic Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. He loved his time with the automobile club, remembering it as “the best job I ever had in my life. It was in the sign department, covering the whole state, thirty-six counties.  We covered twenty-four of the counties. Up one road and down the other, criss cross, zig zag, you name it, getting the road information to put up the signs, getting all this data and going back to the shop and making the signs and then going out and putting them up." Source: OHS Digregorio interview, May 15, 1978, quoted in Roger Hull, Charles E. Heaney: Memory, Imagination, and Place (Salem: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, 2005), 30.

Repairing mattresses at Camp Namanu

by Al Monner for the Oregonian, June 22, 1960, bb008968

Summer camp has been a part of American life for more than a century, and the Camp Fire Girls’ Camp Namanu has been a part of Oregon summers for ninety-one years, the past eighty-eight at its current location on the Sandy River. In the earliest years, girls slept in surplus army tents, but leaders planned more permanent structures in 1925. Architects A.E. Doyle and Pietro Belluschi designed the lodge and several of the cabins. Supporters gathered donations of materials, and the Carpenters Union donated the labor to build the structures. In 1940, additional land was acquired to build the Ranch and riding trails for the teenaged campers. Electricity was brought to the camp in 1946.

In 1928, the camp added a unique system of flush toilets, which “consisted of several stalls with a trough running through the entire length, and all were flushed automatically at the same time at regular intervals by water flowing through from a large tank at one end” (as recounted by camper Jean Marie Ackerson Spring, in Camp Namanu, Portland: Portland Area Council of Camp Fire, 1998).

By 1960, when this photograph was taken, Camp Namanu was one of the largest Camp Fire camps in the nation. Many campers attended the same camp and lived in the same cabins as their mothers had, and those mothers (and fathers) made sure the camp was ready for the girls. There was a work party every weekend in May to get ready for the June opening of camp. Here is part of one of the final work parties for the summer camps of 1960. Julie Maudsley (standing at far right) is keeping an eye on her mother and (from left) Mrs. Ralph Magness, Mrs. Carl Sandoz, and Mrs. S.D. Small as they repair mattresses just a few days ahead of the opening of the thirty-sixth year of Camp Namanu.

In 1975, the sixty-five-year-old national Camp Fire Girls organization became co-ed and changed its name to Camp Fire USA. Camp life continued to thrive and is still popular in the twenty-first century. For 2012, Camp Namanu expects to have at least 1,100 campers enjoying the same activities and cabins that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents enjoyed.

— Mikki Tint, former special collections librarian, OHS Research Library

The end of World War II brought millions of G.I.s back to the United States, creating a housing crisis throughout the country. Few new houses had been built during the 1930s, as the economic realities of the Great Depression kept most people from building or buying a new home. Young couples often started their married life residing with their parents or other family members. People made do.

During World War II, manufacturers introduced prefabricated housing to quickly build communities on the homefront. Communities such as Vanport, Oregon, and Hanford, Washington, were ready for residents in just a few weeks. One of the major manufacturers was Prefabrication Engineering Company, a subsidiary of C.D. Johnson Lumber Company of Toledo, Oregon. Starting in 1938, Prefabrication Engineering, often known as Prenco, made houses in a factory next to its parent sawmill. By 1944, it was making houses in prefabricated sections at the rate of twenty minutes for a one-bedroom house, thirty minutes for a two-bedroom house, and forty minutes for a three-bedroom house. The assembled sections of these buildings were trucked to Portland, where they were furnished by B.P. John Furniture. Furnished sections then were hauled to Hanford, where they were installed on the foundations already poured and waiting.

After the war, prefab housing manufacturers turned their new expertise to civilian housing. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman estimated that an additional five million homes were urgently needed. Prenco was one of the companies that rose to the challenge, making hundreds of prefab houses every month. The company opened a second factory, in a surplus war plant on NE 55th Avenue in Portland, in 1947. Prenco built homes for local residents and also produced components for prefab housing in other parts of the United States. This prototype house was erected on SE Tenino Street.

Prefabrication Engineering Company continued to build prefab houses until 1951, when, a few months after several officers of the company died in an airplane accident, the Georgia-Pacific Corporation purchased the C.D. Johnson Lumber Corporation and its holdings.

— Mikki Tint, former special collections librarian, OHS Research Library

Aerial view of Fort Rock

Delano Photographics, Org. Lot 980, Delano 61355, bb008680

Northwestern Lake County hosts striking Fort Rock, among the least visited landmarks of Oregon. A tuff ring, the circular formation was formed over 100,000 years ago when hot magma encountered water-saturated rocks below a shallow lake. The resulting steam explosion produced a circle of rock debris around the volcanic vent.

Humans have lived near this area for thousands of years. Fort Rock Cave, a mile west of this formation, contained many artifacts from that lengthy habitation, including sagebrush sandals now in the Oregon Historical Society collections. Nineteenth-century ioneers often used Fort Rock as a livestock corral. Oregon author Reuben Long, who owned the landmark at one time, imagined a different use for this ancient site: “I have a plan for the Rock. It would be perfect for a football stadium. The sides would encircle the playing field in the center and it would be simple to arrange tier after tier of seats on three sides, leaving the open side for parking and easy exit. All other universities were going for a long time before they got around to building a football stadium. I have this stadium all built and now I need a university to use it” (E.R. Jackman and R.A. Long, The Oregon Desert (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1966, 372–73).

This oblique aerial view was made on August 10, 1961, as forest fires were burning throughout Oregon and Washington. The one visible at the top of this image was to the northeast, near the town of Fort Rock. The image was taken by Delano Aerial Photographics, one of the leading aerial services in Oregon for decades. In 1945, Leonard Delano purchased the studio of pioneering aerial photographer William C. Brubaker, who he had worked for during World War II. Delano continued the business into the 1990s. In 1998, part of the business was sold, and the remaining thousands of negatives and prints were given to the Oregon Historical Society photographic archives. The collection is indexed and covers hundreds of towns, businesses, and locales in Oregon and Washington.

Wreck of the Peter Iredale, by Woodfield

OrHi 25553

The Peter Iredale is 121 years old this year. A four-masted iron and steel sailing bark, it was the largest sailing vessel built in the Ritson shipyards of Maryport in northwestern England and was launched in June 1890. Named for her original owner, head of the shipping firm P. Iredale & Porter of Liverpool, the bark made eight successful trips to the Pacific Northwest over sixteen years. In late September 1906, it sailed from Salima Cruz, Mexico, to for Portland to pick up a load of wheat. It was Captain H. Lawrence’s fifteenth trip to Astoria.

On October 25, 1906, the ship ran aground on Clatsop Spit during a squall while waiting for a pilot to guide it over the Columbia River bar. The crew of twenty-five sailors, along with two stowaways, was rescued by the men of the U.S. Life-Saving Service stationed at Hammond. Although the ship first rested lightly on the beach, leading many to hope it could be refloated, winds and tides continued to drive it higher onto the sand. Eventually, the Peter Iredale was sold for scrap.

The wreck was a major tourist attraction from the first morning. So many people wanted to see the ship that the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad instructed their conductors to stop near Skipanon for passengers to alight from the morning train and walk a mile and a half to the wreck site. After a few hours at the beach, the sightseers would return to the tracks, where the afternoon train would stop and pick them up for the return to Astoria.

This photo shows the Peter Iredale just three days after the wreck. Since then, it has survived the shelling of Fort Stevens during World War II, battering by storms, and souvenir hunting by tourists, remaining a fascinating and haunting landmark on our coast after 105 years. But while we may applaud its survival today, a writer for the Morning Astorian saw things very differently on October 27, 1906: “As she lies divested of every attribute of advantage, disfigured and forsaken, she is but a startling type of that more dreadful wreck, the man of power, or grace, and honor, dead upon the low levels to which some accursed weakness has cast him.”