“Below we give a fine view of the town of St. Helen’s, in Oregon Territory, situated on the Columbia river, about fifty miles from its mouth. It was settled and named by Mr. Wm. H. Tappan, artist, formerly of Boston, in 1849. The river is rather more than a mile wide opposite the town. The…
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It’s a long-standing exercise to characterize American cities. We debate today just how “weird” is the city of Portland (of course, it’s about as weird as Akron or Omaha or Pensacola, which is to say it’s not). It might be better if we looked for what is distinctive about Portland (Akron, Omaha, Pensacola). A century…
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When I was working on the cookbook Eating It Up in Eden, I sorted through more than 200 contributed family-favorite recipes. Somewhat to my (pleased) surprise, there were very few offerings that duplicated one another–but another surprise was that one of those few duplicated recipes was a dish unfamiliar to me: creamed potatoes and peas (pages…
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Great Northern Railroad, 1930s I hosted the board meeting for our historians’ organization on January 23. Did you know that January 23 was National Pie Day? One of our board members knew that, and she suggested we each bring a pie, sweet or savory, to fuel the meeting. And so we did, with contributions…
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This was the headline of an Oregonian article on October 17, 1904, reporting the theft of a diamond, some rings, and a $1,200 wad of cash from the safe of the Log Cabin Saloon, Billy Winter, proprietor. (Although Winters appears now and again, Winter was probably his name.) The alleged culprit was his head bartender, one…
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Some of the cast of Roaring Timber, Astoria, 1937 In March of 1937, Columbia Picture Corporation sent a production crew from Hollywood to Astoria, in Clatsop County, Oregon, to film scenes for their movie Big Timber. A”film of love and adventure in the logging industry,” Big Timber was to be directed by Spencer Bennett…
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A good deal more research would help this story, but there’s enough at hand to justify putting something down. I recently acquired a small cache of food-related paper ephemera of the label variety (thank you, Corinna, for both your foresight and your more recent insight!). The group includes this small but flashy item, which represents…
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Packing crab, Garibaldi, for San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, ca. 1966 The origin of the crab louis was briefly outlined here last year. Among the sources cited there were the second (1914) and third (1932) editions of The Neighborhood Cook Book, compiled by the Portland Council of Jewish Women. Notably absent was a reference to the…
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Lava Bed Road. Jess house, center (white) Earlier this month Terry and I did the road trip to see his parents. They live on Lava Bed Road near Diamond, Oregon; Google Maps figured this was 319 miles from us, and would take 6 hours and 47 minutes. Of course, we took a different route,…
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The dining room looks pleasant enough, and the napkins are displayed in a spectacular fashion, but the caption is probably a bit of hyperbole. At the right, there is a sign on the wall: COMMERCIAL TABLE MEALS 50 CENTS Traveling salesmen were the bread and butter, so to speak, of small-town hotels such as this…
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