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| Communities like Oak Grove and Jennings Lodge were built along the streetcar line south of Milwaukie in 1893. By 1903, signs of a commercial district in Oak Grove were evident, and the Oregon City Courier said Oak Grove had a population of over 600 people by 1907. Oak Grove’s business district was busy with streetcar passengers well into the 1950s – until the streetcars stopped running in 1958, closing some businesses for good. (Courtesy Oak Lodge History Detectives) |
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SOUTHEAST HISTORY
History of Oak Grove: Part two – disasters by fire
By DANA BECK
Special to THE BEE
Last month in these pages, we began the story of Oak Grove, a community that’s south of Sellwood, and even south of Milwaukie – but one with many ties to the communities to the immediate north, in Multnomah County. Ever shop at the Oak Grove Fred Meyer store down McLoughlin Boulevard? Bingo. Although the actual village is just west of there.
We told of the beginnings of the Oak Grove village in Clackamas County in 1903, and the formation of the first school district south of the City of Milwaukie, in the last issue of THE BEE. I also introduced BEE readers the “Oak Lodge History Detectives”, and their mentor Michael Schmeer. Now, a month later, here’s the rest of the story of the merchants and residents of Oak Grove in the first half of the Twentieth Century.
To start with, I must say that trying to track down the exact dates and locations of merchants in Oak Grove has proved to be a very difficult task. With no known “Sanborn City Maps” available for the community, it was hard to reconstruct the commercial district. And, with only a few Clackamas City Directories available, we could not pin down the exact addresses of businesses like the local barbershop, blacksmith, and grocery store. It took a lot of detective work, research, and sharing of information with local residents, to get a grasp on where and for how long most of the shopkeepers were open for business.
With the help of Mike Schmeer and the Oak Grove Lodge History Detective files, I think that we’ve eventually managed to compile a reasonable list of the early pioneer merchants. But you’ll have to keep close track of the names, since businesses changed hands a lot!
In about 1907, Emmet Warren and his wife were hired by officials of the Portland Railway Company to run the operations for the streetcar company at the Oak Grove Station. Prior to accepting this position, Emmet worked as a contractor, and dabbled in selling a few houses along the way. As agents for the railway company, the Warrens were probably expected to issue tickets, post up-to-date arrival and departure times for the streetcar at the waiting station, and basically act as tourist information guides.
Riding a streetcar was a new and exciting experience for most in the early 1900s, so passengers needed a lot of guidance. The Warrens could assist them with how to transfer from one streetcar to another, for that special fishing excursion to Estacada – or know when the baseball game or foot races started at Canemah Park near Oregon City! Nobody wanted to arrive late for the events they were traveling for – such as the start of dancing at the Canemah Park Pavilion, or to enjoy D’Unrano’s Royal Italian Band in person.
When he wasn’t issuing tickets, socializing with waiting passengers, or handling large parcels and boxes in the Express Office of the streetcar company, Emmet also operated a confectionary shop. There was additional money to be made from the passengers waiting patiently for the streetcar to arrive with ice cold drinks, cigars, hard candy, ice cream, and light sandwiches in his store – standard items often found in confectionaries in the earlier parts of the Twentieth Century.
As it turns out, E.C. Warren already had a reputation as a respected businessman even before he settled in Oak Grove. He was a member of the Oregon City Elks Club and other fraternal organizations where merchants and leaders met to discuss politics, the economy, and business. On several occasions the Warren family’s name showed up in the society section of the newspapers, suggesting that Emmet and his wife remained active in the business world of Portland to the north, and Oregon City to the south.
It was at one of the Elks Club meetings that Warren met, and decided to partner with, A.L. Armstrong – both would become real estate agents for the Columbia Trust Company, to be named the “Armstrong and Warren Group”. While both men initially focused on real estate opportunities in the new Inner Southeast neighborhood of Eastmoreland which was just beginning to change from a grassy pasture to a new community, it was the small village of Oak Grove to the south that both men even then had their eyes on.
Armstrong and Warren specialized in advancing business opportunities for young people who wanted to own their own business -- a meat market or a barber shop, for example. Oak Grove was in need of many services, and Anderson and Warren wanted to help these new entrepreneurs in any way they could, offering the equipment they might need to become successful merchants. By 1909, the duo had contracted to have a small one-story building erected on Center Avenue, between Lee and Cedar Avenue, for much needed blacksmith shop in the area.
Yet, the Warren family still enjoyed being engaged in the elite society of Portland’s business world. But they moved into Oak Grove to establish themselves in the new neighborhood. Emmet ordered the construction of a three-bedroom, two-bath home, complete with a reception hall, and dining and living room. Among the conveniences he took advantage of in his new house was electric lighting, which he had throughout it, while most other homes in the suburbs were still lit by oil lamps and candles.
During this time, Emmet became owner of what was then called the Warren Building or “Warren Block” on the northeast corner of Railroad Avenue (Arista Drive) and Center Avenue (Oak Grove Boulevard). As often happens to partnerships composed of successful and strong-willed men, Armstrong and Warren parted ways after about two years, moving on individually to other opportunities. And he sold his confectionary to William Holt, a onetime lineman for the streetcar company, in March of 1909.
Now, we remind you that names came and went in this community. And it was not long before the Oregon City Enterprise newspaper wrote that the new firm of “E.C. Warren and R.E. Emmons” had purchased the Graham Grocery Store, and were “fixing up and painting” their new store along Center Avenue. In an early business promotion, the new owners invited Mrs. Jessie Durbin to demonstrate her new cream salad dressing to the ladies of the neighborhood – a product which happened only to be available at the Warren and Emmons store. The Warrens and Emmons grocery store more than likely was housed in the Warren Building – but, again, newspaper accounts at the time were vague about the exact location.
Warren, Armstrong, and Emmons weren’t the only businessmen eyeing the village of Oak Grove. The community was in desperate need of a place for gatherings and meetings. Newly organized groups like The Oak Grove Improvement Organization (with 124 members in 1907), and social groups at the Methodist Episcopal Church, as well as Teacher and Parent groups were looking for a large building for meetings, get-togethers, and after-school activities.
So Fred Greene (his name was often misspelled as Green), another Portland businessman, decided to throw his hat into the Oak Grove ring. Greene built the first two story commercial structure on Railroad at Center Avenues, across the railway tracks from the Warren Building.
The Greene Building was about half a city block long, with glass front windows and a dance and entertainment hall located either on the second floor of the building, or else just to the north of it. From the day it opened, Greene’s Hall became the social gathering place for the Oak Grove community.
News items about a grand Hallowe’en masquerade ball, and later a fundraiser for the Oak Grove boys’ basketball team in 1908, give us an idea of when Greene’s Hall had opened. It was a regular meeting place for the Oak Grove Telephone Company, and men’s monthly meetings – like the Oak Grove Elks Club, and Woodsmen of America fraternal organization. Not having a gym for their basketball team, the Oak Grove boys’ Junior and Senior teams played some thrilling close games against Milwaukie, Oregon City, and Sellwood – often in front of a packed house.
Greene’s Hall was also used by the Oak Grove Girls Band, who held concerts there and also practiced for their next performances in the space. Many residents gathered at the hall for weekly dances, parties, and holiday celebrations – and, in 1908, there was a gala event of some sort called the “Bon Bon dance”. For the next twenty years Greene’s Hall would be the pride of the community. The Greene Building actually still stands in the neighborhood – it’s now home to the Trolley Tavern at Oak Grove Boulevard and Arista Drive.
By 1911, the village was beginning to bustle as trade began picking up on Oak Grove’s main road; and the waiting room for the streetcar’s downtown morning commute to work was filled to capacity. Thirty-two new homes were by then scattered around the village, and with the Greene complex on the west side of the railway tracks and the Warren building on the east, there were plenty of new merchants to entice residents to shop in their own commercial district.
A rivalry had begun, and Warren and Greene battled each other in offering opportunities for new merchants to lease their space. Oak Grove was to witness a game of musical chairs as merchants and store owners moved from one building to the next, or left town opting to set up businesses elsewhere.
When J.G. Turck & Sons arrived in Oak Grove from Grants Pass, they opened up a plumbing and general repair shop in the Warren Building. Besides plumbing kitchens and bathrooms, they also sold cooking ranges and heating stoves from their showroom – sales that included delivery and setup. The Turck family also put their tinsmith skills to use offering to install metal chimneys in households. By then, storefronts and new shops were appearing everywhere on the main thoroughfare of Oak Grove.
While its exact location is uncertain, W.A. Hanson opened a much-needed drugstore, and Closset and Devers became a place where busy workers could stop by for a hot cup of coffee or a chilled tea, at their coffee and tea shop on Center Avenue. Besides owning a half interest in a confectionary, W.J. Alexander began circulating a petition for a possible saloon license for those residents who wanted something stronger to drink than freshly-brewed coffee.
The National Conservatory of Music opened a branch studio in the Greene Building. The class of 25 students was expected to assist in teaching piano, violin, mandolin, guitar, and banjo to potential students. And Mrs. Elizabeth Cosgraft announced she would be serving sandwiches from her delicatessen for customers on the go, and also complete lunches, at her shop in the Greene Building.
Linnett and Emmons were, by now, operating the grocery store once belonging to Warren and Emmons. If all these changes seem confusing to you in our retelling here, it was confusing even to the local residents, who were uncertain about which new business might be showing up on Central Avenue on their next shopping trip. Many wondered what name would pop up next to the marquee in front of the store they had only just shopped in. But as long as they didn’t have to travel over to Milwaukie, or up to Sellwood, for groceries and supplies, everyone seemed unconcerned with these ever-changing merchants.
As the commercial district began settling down and formed some type of stability for customers, life continued in Oak Grove. Hundreds of people boarded the streetcar in the first week of June in 1911 to visit the festivities of the Portland Rose Festival, and cheer on the town’s own float that was entered in the Grand Parade. In the same year, the graduating class of Oak Grove School gathered for a picnic and a day of fun at the Clackamas River.
But the happy celebrations and fireworks display after the 4th of July soon turned darker; and periodic disasters clouded the future of Oak Grove – starting with when Werner’s Grocery and Hardware Store caught fire and burned to the ground, on the warm Thursday morning of July 18th, 1912.
Herman E. Werner had first arrived in the Oak Grove settlement from outer Oregon City, where he’d once operated a grocery in the town of Willamette. As a successful merchant, Werner and had just stocked his new Oak Grove store when the alarm went out to the nearest volunteer fire company – which did not arrive in time to save any of it. His store was a total loss. And, although the building was insured, there wasn’t enough money received from the insurer to cover the loss of a fully-stocked store. So a despondent Herman Werner moved to the Lents area in East Portland, and the following year he committed suicide on the very day of his wedding.
Amazingly, even after the Werner store disaster, there still didn’t seem to be any real interest in organizing a fire department in Oak Grove. Even among the more vocal members of the Oak Grove Improvement Association there didn’t seem to be much concern that the community lacked even a volunteer fire company – despite the fact that local houses were still primarily heated by woodstoves and lit by oil lamps or even candles, and despite Oak Grove having seen its share of household fires leaving families destitute.
Relying on fire departments elsewhere seemed to be accepted – even though the dirt roads for any fire wagon or truck to travel on when an alarm sounded in Oak Grove were difficult to navigate, made even worse in wet weather, and the nearest professional fire stations were miles away in Sellwood and Milwaukie.
So it is not really a surprise that tragedy hit Oak Grove once again less than two years after the Werner building burned down. On October 8th of 1914, Mrs. I.V. Kinney, who operated a bakery in the Greene Building, noticed smoke coming from the chimney flue in her store. Mrs. Kinney hastily cried out an alarm to the tenants of the building to vacate immediately, and a call for help went out. The Portland Railway Light & Power Company, which operated an office in the building, sent a firefighting streetcar down the tracks to battle the flames. However, this streetcar was unable to stop the fire, and the Greene Building was a complete loss.
The electrical equipment and the central switchboard of the new local telephone company, along with the ticket office of the P.R.L.& P. company, were also lost in the fire, as were several shops – Frank Port’s confectionary, Linnet and Emmons’ grocery, Mrs. Kinney’s bakery, and a few apartments, the renters of which lived on the premises. The loss of Oak Grove’s largest commercial building was a shock to many, and it also left over 200 customers without telephone service.
Collecting what he could from his insurance policy, Fred Greene regrouped, investing $1,600 to build what was then considered a new fireproof concrete building to provide a sense of permanence and security for the shop owners moving into it. The new Greene structure included a full basement, a ground floor divided into four different store spaces, and a large dance hall on the second floor.
While Greene did have enough capital to continue his business, the other merchants who lost everything in the fire weren’t as fortunate. Linnett and Emmons’ Grocery sold its remaining stock to a couple of young entrepreneurs from Portland, Brownlie and Chatterton, who planned to open a new grocery store. Mrs. I.V. Kinney’s bakery never reopened after the fire, and the Oak Grove Telephone Company and the Portland Railway and Light and Power Company had to relocate to space over in the Warren Building just east of the former Greene Building.
With the waiting room for the streetcars gone, passengers then had to disembark on the east side of the trolley at a temporary waiting room and ticket office in the Warren Building – a new experience for Oak Grove residents making their weekly trip to town.
On the lighter side, two of Oak Grove’s most popular new merchants in business then were William Stokes, the grocer, and Floyd Feighner, the barber.
Floyd Feighner wasn’t your typical barber. Customers who came to sit in the barber’s chair for a haircut and to relax after a hard day of work, with a warm towel across their faces, were startled by the cackling of chickens and crowing of roosters nearby: During slow times, Floyd tended to the white roosters he had penned up in the rear of his shop. According to newspaper reports, Floyd often had to put down his scissors and leave patrons in the chair – sometimes with those patrons following him close behind, shaving cream on their faces – to assist his chickens, who were in battle with other neighboring poultry.
If that wasn’t enough to disrupt a peaceful day in the barber’s chair, customers were also addressed with a repetitive “Hello” from Floyd’s pet parrot Rex, who was on constant duty guarding the front door.
It should be added that William Stokes, the grocer, had his unexpected moments also. He and a quartet of singers gathered at the Stokes Grocery Store every Sunday for an evening of practice. Their cadences were appreciated by the neighborhood dogs, who provided a background chorus of howling and barking every time the singers started up.
In 1916 Oak Grove’s first amusement park opened. That park was inspired by Louis Colosky, who lived in Oak Grove, having visited the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. He was so enthralled by that experience in Northwest Portland that he decided to create his own amusement park, but of course on a smaller scale. Securing a site on the west side of Center Street on the riverfront, over time he erected a dance pavilion capable of holding an orchestra, and added an ice cream and soft drink parlor.
Oak Grove resident and ace Oak Grove History detective Mike Schmeer tells me that eventually the park reached 77 acres in size, and contained picnic grounds, a bathing beach with facilities, boats, canoes, a Merry-Go-Round, a store, and various concession stands. Once he had finally had the park built and open, Colosky ran it for about five years before it closed. But it did establish expectations in local residents of having fun by the river in Oak Grove, and young people and families continued to gather there on hot days in the summer. “Girls and boys from Gladstone, Milwaukie, and other villages nearby who have been swimming at the Oak Grove Beach come in bunches to wait for the {street} cars,” reported the August issue of the Oregon Journal in 1915.
Life in Oak Grove was improving for residents new and old, but residents still had to travel to Milwaukie or Portland to attend a theater, shop at a department store, or have a night out at a fine restaurant. Mr. and Mrs. Warren, among the first to bring prosperity to Oak Grove, sold their elaborate home and business building to F.A Smith, a retired banker from Montana, in 1919, and moved north to the bright lights and big city of Portland where they established the Warren Transfer Company, owning a fleet of trucks that delivered freight and shipping between Portland and Hood River.
Oak Grove continued to grow, but despite the previous fire disasters, the people of Oak Grove still failed to organize a firefighting company or obtain any firefighting equipment. It’s said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it – and on January 31st, 1921, as reported in the Oregon Journal newspaper, a party of people returning to Oak Grove from an event in Oregon City was shocked on arrival to find that a fire had completely destroyed the old Warren building. It had started in the rear of the Post Office – and, like a scene in an old western movie, the people of Oak Grove had lined up to form a bucket brigade, to try to douse the flames. Alas, it burned much faster than the buckets arrived, and the effort was fruitless.
Stores destroyed by this latest fire included a confectionary owned by Mrs. Hobkirk, the waiting room of the P.R.L. and P. Co. (again!), D.N. Olier’s butcher shop, the Oak Grove Post Office, and a supply store owned by Mrs. V.G. Benvie. Also included in the damage was F.M. Little’s Grocery Store, and an auto repair garage run by David Smith.
Bystanders did try to salvage some furniture from the burning buildings, and six automobiles owned by Mrs. Hobkirk which had been parked in the garage were driven out by members of the crowd that had gathered.
But did any of this finally prompt the establishment of a local firehouse?
No. That fire was in 1921. It wouldn’t be until 1944 that residents would celebrate the opening of an Oak Grove Fire Station on Oak Grove Boulevard!
Despite the periodic fire tragedies and the constant coming and going of vendors and shops, the Oak Grove commercial district started to flourish in the 1920’s – and early into the 30’s, before the Great Depression put a damper on business. New buildings could be found on both sides of what was still called Center Avenue, and the new businesses in them included a barber shop, a blacksmith, a beauty salon, a feed store, and the Oak Grove Pharmacy. By then the commercial district extended as far west as River Road.
As business began to recover from the Great Depression in the later 1930s, the neighborhoods of Milwaukie Heights, Courtney, Oak Grove, and Jennings Lodge resumed growing in population. Automobiles were firmly established as the preferred mode of daily transportation, and residents began clamoring for a highway into Portland.
In 1937, using funds and workers from the Works Progress Administration, a new “Super Highway” was started at the Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland, eventually extending as far south as Oregon City. We know it today as Oregon Highway 99E, and even better as McLoughlin Boulevard.
Indeed, this made travel to and from Portland and Oregon City easier and faster, but it proved to be a major blow to the commercial district of Oak Grove, as passing motorists now began shopping at the restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, and other businesses that lined the highway – which passed by just east of most of Oak Grove.
Store owners and merchants were, once again, faced with a decision about whether to continue in business there, when sadly, the Oak Grove streetcar traveled down the rails for one last run through the neighborhood in 1958.
What once was the heart of the community that Oak Grove was built around, and was solely dependent on, was now just a part of history – and it would take some time for the community to recover from its loss. But Oak Grove is again making a comeback!
Oak Grove has gone through many changes during the past hundred years, yet it still retains its charm and family atmosphere and values. The laughter and shouts of schoolchildren at the New Urban School bring back memories of the days when Oak Grove students roamed and played in the neighborhood a century ago. The Infamous Barber Studio and Oak Grove Salon reminds longtime residents of when Freighner the Barber played jokes on customers, and a parrot greeted customers entering in his shop, as his chickens cackled behind the store.
And, now, the six-mile Trolley Trail has been established by the North Clackamas Parks and Recreation District and Metro, as well as the voters of Clackamas County who urged the purchase of the old trolley right of way in 2001. Visitors can now travel that trail by bike or on foot, and perhaps experience those long-ago days when passengers saw the same features and scenery as they rode the tracks on the old trolley.
There was a time when old timers gathered around benches outside the streetcar waiting room, sharing stories and spreading gossip. If you visit the Oak Grove commercial district today west of McLoughlin Boulevard, you might just find a like-minded group of people – maybe the Oak Grove Festival Committee, or the Oak Lodge History Detectives – seated around a table at the Awakening Coffee Shop, gazing out at a stand of Oak Grove’s trees, and planning the community’s next festival, or sharing recent discoveries about the history of the neighborhood.
Before I end my story this month, a special thank you to Mike Schmeer, who helped in this compilation of the History of Oak Grove, and who verified the facts in this article.
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