Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People

Claimants

32 Claimants When in doubt, you farmed. That was the United States in 1860, when agricultural employment was the default option. As the storm of civil war gathered, 60 percent of all American workers counted by the national census were farmers and farmhands, not to mention the family members who pitched in to tend livestock, chase chickens out of the garden, churn butter, and mend fences. It was the same in the wide, wild landscape that would gradually be transformed into the Portland metropolitan area over the next 150 years. In the early 1850s, close to a thousand households took up land in the future Portland region under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. This federal legislation rewarded early Oregon pioneers by allowing them to claim 320 acres (640 acres for a married couple). As census takers made their way from house to house across fresh-flowing streams and stump-filled fields in the spring of 1860, they recorded information that gives us snapshots of Portland ’s early landholders. Two miles east of the Willamette, Timothy and Margaret Sullivan farmed 319 acres that spanned the gulch to which they gave their name. They were Irish born, but had reached Oregon the long way around via Australia, where they had married and had two children in the 1840s. They endured the long voyage to Oregon in 1850 and recorded their claim the following year. Farther north, where higher land dropped to the Columbia Slough, was the Whitaker clan—Anthony from Ireland, Isabella from Scotland, a son born in Missouri, and two younger daughters born in Oregon. Henry McEntire, a laborer, and Susan Fitzgerald, an 11-year-old born in Missouri—maybe a servant, maybe a cousin, maybe a family friend—rounded out the household. Nearby, on land now occupied by Portland International Airport, were the Holtgrieves, Henry from Germany and Elizabeth from Iowa, with threeyear -old Emma and infant Oceana (a name that hopefully did not burden her later in life). Many households included single men as well as the core family—evidence that the frontier attracted the young, restless, and unemployed. The Tibbetts establishment in the future Brooklyn neighborhood included two farmhands, and Perry Prettyman’s farm near Mount Tabor required three laborers to supplement family. The Wilcoxes at Hillsboro hired a farmhand from Ireland, but the Stotts in the future Beaverton made do with their teenaged sons. Some of the early claimants were winners, and some were not. Many sold and moved on over the course of the 1850s. Some stuck, like Amos King, claimants 33 who arrived in Oregon in 1849 and sealed a deal for Daniel Lownsdale’s tannery and a claim of 535 acres that ran from the modern Lovejoy Street south through what is now the King’s Hill neighborhood. He built a spacious house just south of Burnside in 1856 and lived comfortably for the next 45 years. Not so fortunate was hot-tempered Danford Balch, whose farmstead was located along “Balch Creek” at what is now the Upshur Street entrance to Macleay Park. On November 18, 1858, authorities arrested him for the very public murder of an unwanted son-in-law at the Stark Street Ferry. He broke from Portland’s flimsy jail and hid for weeks in the forest above his farm before he was recaptured and executed in 1859, leaving seven children at home as well as his estranged daughter. Only in the nascent towns were there landowners who did not describe themselves as farmers. George Abernathy, who owned acres above Oregon City, was a merchant, but his son James has come down recorded as a farmer. In Portland itself, William Chapman was a lawyer. John Couch was a wharfinger or warehouse keeper, although much of his family money would come from increasing land values in Northwest Portland. Stephen Coffin was more blunt; he was a “townsite proprietor,” a land speculator pure and simple. Map of Portland, 1866. By 1866, land speculators had extended the original plat of Portland to the north and south and across the river to lay out the beginnings of East Portland. Tanner Creek flows from the West Hills along the western edge of town and empties into the Willamette north of the wetlands that are now the upscale River District. (Portland City Archives) ...