Multnomah County Archives

This is a hand drawn map from an 1884 land survey field notes book showing that Sauvie Island is primarily located within Township 2 North (T2N), Range 1 West (R1W) of the Willamette Meridian, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Dividing land into townships in the United States officially started with the Land Ordinance of 1785, passed by the Confederation Congress on May 20, 1785, to systematically survey and sell western public lands into a grid of square townships (6 miles by 6 miles) and sections (1 mile by 1 mile). This ordinance established the rectangular Public Land Survey System (PLSS) for distributing federal lands, a departure from older, irregular settlement patterns.

When a section (640 acres) is divided into a smaller piece of land that land is called an aliquot.  In the United States Public Land Survey System, an “aliquot part” is a legal subdivision of a larger section of land into halves or fourths.

Multnomah County (the 13th county established in Oregon Territory) was created on this day December 22, 1854, formed out of two other Oregon counties – the eastern part of Washington County and the northern part of Clackamas County. Its creation was a result of a petition earlier that year by businessmen in Portland complaining of the inconvenient location of the Washington County seat in Hillsboro and of the share of Portland tax revenues leaving the city to support Washington County farmers. The Multnomah County Commissioners met for the first time on Jan. 17, 1855.

To celebrate Archives Month, the County Archives is sharing one of the oldest items in its custody: the 1849-1854 deed record book (multco055 vol 48). The deeds were recorded for parts of Washington County, which later became Multnomah County. Multnomah County (the 13th in Oregon Territory) was created on December 22, 1854, formed out of two other Oregon counties – the eastern part of Washington County and the northern part of Clackamas County. Its creation was a result of a petition earlier that year by businessmen in Portland complaining of the inconvenient location of the Washington County seat in Hillsboro and of the share of Portland tax revenues leaving the city to support Washington County farmers. County commissioners met for the first time on January 17, 1855. The county is named after the Chinookan word for the "lower river", multnomah, matlnomaq, or máɬnumax̣ being interpretive English spellings of the same word. In Chinook jargon, Ne-matlnomaq, means the "place of matlnomaq" or the (singular) Ne-matlnomag, "the lower river", from the Oregon City Falls toward the Columbia River.

From multco055 vol 48

October 13th is Indigenous Peoples Day. Multnomah County first recognized Indigenous Peoples' Day in 2015 to raise awareness that Indigenous people are still here and that, despite centuries of systematic efforts to forcibly remove and eliminate Indigenous people, they have fought back against genocide — not only to survive, but to thrive. Portland has the ninth largest urban Indigenous population in the country. Indigenous community resources can be found at the County homepage here: https://multco.us/info/native-american-indigenous-community-resources.

Our community partners provide resources for education, including early education and preschool, college prep, high school completion and tutoring. Other services include rent and utility assistance, employment, domestic violence support, elder's services, Indigenous gardening and plant medicine.

Multnomah County Library has classes and events this month celebrating Indigenous heritage https://multcolib.org/indigenous-community-resources.

October 13th at Barbie’s Village from 4 PM – 8 PM (935 NE 33rd Ave, Portland, OR 97232) there will be a heritage celebration hosted by Future Generations Collaborative PDX with Native vendors, food, speakers, and a Children’s Pow Wow.

Photograph by Motoya Nakamura on the 1st Indigenous People’s Day Proclamation on Oct 8, 2015 before the Board of County Commissioners.

Electronic Records Day observed today on 10/10 (a nod to binary code) is all about getting the word out on the huge amount of digital information we create and how vital it is to manage and save it properly. Government archives, like the Multnomah County Archives, preserve documents that validate what the government has done: what worked, what failed, and what lessons might be learned. Access to these documents can inform decision-making and policy creation.

How are you preserving your own digital footprint? Use this 4 step method to protect your most important digital files, from family photos to vital documents.

1. Locate your digital files stored on electronic devices, in the Cloud and on external storage devices. With so much data created daily, focus on what you would most regret losing.

2. Organize and name your digital files which will make them easier to find and manage for years to come. Use short descriptive file names, arrange your files in folders in a logical hierarchy, and delete duplicates.

3. Back up using the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data which includes the original file and 2 backups located on Cloud storage or an external drive.

4. Maintain and migrate: Monitor your storage annually to check a few files to ensure they are still readable, and every 5-7 years migrate at-risk file formats to more stable, modern formats.

Here we see the River Patrol boathouse and dock from Feb 1, 1963 when a huge ice storm left a thick coating of ice on the dock and froze parts of the Columbia River along Marine Drive.

The River Patrol Unit provides public safety services to 110 miles of waterways in Multnomah County, including the Columbia, Willamette and Sandy Rivers, as well as the Multnomah Channel. River Patrol Unit deputies respond to emergency calls for service, provide boating-safety examinations and conduct criminal and accident investigations. Created in 1960, the River Patrol Unit is well established, the team of deputies are very active in the community, often attending events and expos, and providing outreach and educational opportunities year-round. The unit currently consists of a Captain, Lieutenant, Sergeant and six deputies.

View of the Radio Room at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office taken in 1969. A Radio Room was also known as a Dispatch Center or Emergency Communications Center, that served as the central hub for coordinating law enforcement and emergency services. Before police and emergency services started using radio communication (early 1930s), police would use call boxes on street corners to communicate. Lights, bells or sirens at precinct stations were used to notify the beat policemen to call in.

On the 1913 voter registration card of Harriet “Hattie” Redmond, her occupation is listed as “hairdresser”, but from this record you would never know how significant this card is for Redmond who was a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement in Oregon.

Redmond was born Harriet Crawford in about 1862 in St. Louis, Missouri. After living briefly in Hood River, Oregon, the Crawfords moved to Portland some time around 1880. Her mother Vina Crawford was a domestic worker and father Reuben was a skilled ship caulker. The family attended Mt. Olivet Baptist Church on Northwest Seventh (now Broadway) and Everett where she held suffrage meetings in 1912.

Per The Oregon Encyclopedia “Hattie Redmond died of bronchial pneumonia on June 27, 1952, at the age of ninety. Her contributions to women’s voting rights and full citizenship were virtually unknown until historians found the details of her life in the historical record during the 2012 centennial celebration of Oregon woman suffrage. In the years after her death, her simple grave marker at Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery became buried. Members of the Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery uncovered the marker and replaced it with a headstone honoring Redmond’s life and work with the inscription “Black American suffragist.” 

June is Pride Month, and we commemorate former County Chair Gretchen Kafoury for her activism and allyship in support of the LGBTQIA2S+ community in Oregon. Her commitment to activism started long before she served as a County Commissioner and Chair when she was a student at Reed College participating in demonstrations for a variety of civil rights causes. In the 1970s Gretchen was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives where she became a sponsor of a bill to ban sexual orientation discrimination. Gretchen was elected Multnomah County Commissioner in 1985, and in that role she successfully worked for a resolution that banned sexual orientation discrimination in county employment. She served two terms on Portland City Council continuing her work in serving underserved communities and fighting for equal rights for all. Kafoury would meet people where they were at and would often fundraise at gay and lesbian bars, some of the only safe spaces for the LGBTQIA2S+ community at the time. Throughout her life Gretchen received recognition and numerous awards for her allyship. Gretchen Kafoury’s legacy is a reminder that we all have a part to play in standing up for the civil liberties of our friends and neighbors.

This Oregonians for Fairness 1988 fundraising mailer (Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury records multco053) was sent out to raise awareness and defeat Measure 8 - a ballot measure that would revoke the Governor's authority to ban discrimination, based on sexual orientation, in state executive department employment and services. Other records relating to Measure 8, Measure 9, and Gretchen’s other advocacy work can be found in the Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury (District 2) records (multco053) at the Multnomah County Archives.

Sometimes you come across a story in a group of records that stands out from the other papers in a collection. Within the County Poor Farm's business correspondence (Collection multco002) there are letters between B. Fujii (a farmer in Troutdale, OR) and Edgefield Manor (the County Poor Farm)  Superintendent O.A. Johnson from 1942-1944. So who were these men and what was their relationship during WWII?

Adjacent to Edgefield Manor, there was a 140 acre farm owned by Bukichi and Yoshino Fujii, Japanese immigrants who came to America in the early 1900s, started a family (6 boys and two girls), and successfully sold produce at the Portland Farmers Market and Gresham Berry Growers. The Fujii family’s story is unique because many Japanese-American families that were sent to incarceration camps never regained their property after World War II. The Fujii’s were able to keep their farm with help from neighbors.  One of those neighbors was Edgefield Manor, whose Superintendent O.A. Johnson entered into an agreement with the Fujii family to cut and sell hay from the Fujii farm’s adjoining 27acres. A letter in this collection dated October 28, 1942 describes the cost of labor, seeding the hay, the cutting and bailing, and the amount of profit leftover totalling $468.33. Other letters in the collection mention sending money to the Fujiis who were then working at a labor camp in Nyssa, Oregon.

The Fujii family were relocated to Nyssa, after being detained at the Portland Assembly Center, where they worked as critical farm laborers living in tent camps for much of that time. Established as a result of the "Oregon Plan" for the forced removal and confinement of the state's Nikkei residents, the camp held approximately three hundred fifty laborers at its peak. Another letter that B. Fujii sent to O.A. Johnson states that “. . . there are over 300 Japanese, formerly farmers in Hillboro, Gresham, and the Yakima Valley of Washington. They are an asset to the farmers in this part of the country as we are all old hands in this field.”

For Preservation Week (April 27th - May 3rd), it’s fun to share some of the unusual media formats you might find in the Archives that we preserve alongside our many paper and digital records. Archives are entrusted with preserving a large variety of records and some media can be more challenging to preserve and make accessible due to the rapid changes in technology. Things can become outdated so quickly! Audiovisual records and early born-digital computer files can be difficult to play back as this media can be very fragile. We may not have a functioning playback machine to hear or see the records. Archivists provide access for future generations by keeping one foot in the past. One of those preservation challenges here at the County Archives were dictation records on blue vinyl recordings called Audographs.

An Audograph was a dictation disc format introduced in 1946 by the Gray Manufacturing Company in the US. They were thin plastic discs, recorded from the inside to the outside, the opposite of conventional phongraph discs. Unlike a phongraph discs, the Audograph was driven by a surface-mounted wheel, meaning that its recording and playback speed decreased toward the edge of the disc (like the Compact Disc and other digital formats), to keep a more constant linear velocity and to improve playing time. Audograph discs were available in three different sizes. 

At the County Archives, we used a record player with digital output to play the vinyl discs from the Board of County Commissioners records (multco008) at 33 rpms, and using a media player slowed the speed to sound more like normal human speech. Now it was possible to digitize these recordings and provide access.

If you want to learn more about different types of old formats you can go to https://obsoletemedia.org/obsolescence-decade/ where I got some additional information about Audographs for this post.

If you have questions about preserving your family records, we can help! Feel free to contact us via email at [email protected]. We can give you some preservation advice, or point you in the right direction.

Preservation week was started by the American Library Association’s  Core (ALA) team. Preservation Week inspires action to preserve personal, family, and community collections in addition to library, museum, and archive collections.

For some handy quick preservation tips you can visit this website for more information on how to preserve your own family archive: https://preservationweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/PWfirststep_nodate.pdf

And free preservation webinars https://preservationweek.org/past-webinars/

The current Burnside Bridge, built in 1926, is located on one of the longest and busiest streets in the Portland area. About 45,000 vehicles a day use it, along with about 2,000 pedestrians and 4,000 bicyclists each day.

The three-span Burnside is a historically significant structure. It was the first Willamette River bridge in Portland designed with the help of an architect, a result of the early 20th century City Beautiful Movement that called for adding architectural ornamentation to engineering designs. The bridge's distinctive Italian Renaissance towers reflect the trend. Originally designed by the firm of Hedrick and Kremers, Burnside was completed by Gustav Lindenthal (1850-1935). Burnside's drawbridge opening mechanism, or bascule, was designed by Joseph Strauss (1870-1938), whose Golden Gate suspension bridge would open 11 years after Burnside.

The beautiful architectural plans of the Burnside featured in this video are bound together in the large volume that is part of the Board of County Commissioners collection (multco008).

The Burnside Bridge main river structure consists of two 268-foot steel deck truss side spans and a 252-foot double-leaf Strauss trunnion bascule draw span. Two concrete counterweights weighing 1900 tons each can be lowered to open the two lift span leafs when a ship needs to pass.

The bridge originally had six lanes of traffic, but in 1995 the City of Portland requested that bike lanes be added to the bridge, so one lane of traffic was converted into two bike lanes. Two lanes carry westbound motor vehicle traffic and three lanes carry eastbound traffic. The outside eastbound lane is reserved for transit only.

Last year, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted a resolution to move forward with an inverted Y design option for the future look of the new Burnside Bridge. At 17 feet, the new Burnside Bridge will have the largest bike and pedestrian space of all downtown Portland bridges.

For Women’s History month, a spotlight on the women of the Multnomah County Health Department who have worked to provide healthcare and information countywide for decades. Your work is vital to improve health equity and we thank you for your service.

Historic photographs are from the Director's Office (DOH) Department of Health records, multco047 (Box 6)

Gladys McCoy (right) and Multnomah County Library Director Sarah Long, with Rosie the Reader, c.1980s. (Multnomah County Library Photographs and Commissioner’s Records: Gladys McCoy multco032).

Gladys McCoy dedicated her life to helping people help themselves. She held  positions at Head Start, the Portland School Board, and the Board of Multnomah County Commissioners, where she also served as County Chair. McCoy believed that what people do is “not worth doing” if others are “not better off as a result.” Gladys McCoy viewed education as a path to success stating “The way to address the fears, frustration and hostility rooted in segregation is for people to have the experience of living and working together with people who are different from themselves...at the very earliest age.” While on the Portland Public School Board she worked to desegregate Portland elementary schools, and help working mothers find educational opportunities. 

North Portland Library has served the Black community in Portland since its opening in 1913. In this photo we see the Bradwell family enjoying the library and its resources. This past weekend the North Portland branch celebrated its grand re-opening after undergoing renovations and the construction of a new Black Cultural Cultural Center to serve generations to come. Check out the refreshed spaces and beautiful new artwork created in partnership with the Regional Arts and Culture featuring artwork by Kayin Talton Davis, Sadé DuBoise and Melanie Stevens.