Portland's Lost Waterfront

During my days of working on the docks it slowly dawned on me that a city 113 miles from the sea is an odd place for a major seaport. When I began researching the subject, and discovered how these rather shallow and often treacherous waters were "improved" over the years to allow for the progression of deeper and deeper drafts of increasingly larger vessels, I was amazed that the story was one that few people knew. The unique situation of Portland can only be understood by comparing our seaport to others. As a final illustration to the "How Deep is My River?" series of blog posts I offer this info graphic published in October 1912 in Engineering News magazine. It shows the principle inland seaports and their respective distances from the sea. Engineering News, Oct. 1912 Philadelphia    94  --- The first 38 miles is the 25 mile-wide Delaware Bay. New Orleans  100 London           70  -- Wide inlet at the...

My "static, HTML5" website, (as it would be called by a geek), is Portland's Lost Waterfront at: www.portlandwaterfront.org . Today it received a bit of an overhaul looking toward the appearance in April of my new book: The Oregon Shanghaiers: Columbia River Crimping From Astoria to Portland, to be published by History Press . I also included a content menu for some of the more popular posts in this blog.

A Well-known Portland Character, Well-known No More One of the small multitude of interesting characters to pass through Portland in the last part of the 19th century was Matthew Mark Dee. He was born in 1858 in a Tammany ward in New York City to Irish immigrant parents. When Matt was just a wee lad his parents sent him to live with relatives in Ireland, ostensibly to “receive an education.” In relating this story in later years he would often say that all he learned in Ireland was “to speak with a brogue.” I have an inkling of an idea that maybe little Matt was a pain in the ass. It wasn’t long after the boy returned home from Ireland that his papa made arrangements with captain Campbell, of the British schooner, Sea Hawk , 1 to take the little fellow off his hands, maybe for good this time. Matt was only 12 years old.  It was quite common, in those days, for sailing vessels to take on several young boys—often family friends of the captain, or shipping company officials. The...

The snowy streets of Astoria By 1889 the power of the ultra-crimp, Jim Turk, was failing. He had imbibed too freely, and for too long and his alcoholism was getting him by the throat. His young son Charles (from a former relationship than his present one) had moved to Tacoma to try to make a name for himself on the waterfront sending men to sea as sailors. His young son, Frank, still a teenager, was hanging around with a creepy Astoria hoodlum and want-to-be crimp named, Paddy Lynch. The other Astoria crimps, under the direction of Larry Sullivan, were moving in on the territory in a big way. They were starting to pull crews that had shipped in Portland off the vessels, replacing them with their own. Violence was at its worst, and ship’s captains were nearly helpless. In the post before this I told the story from the viewpoint of the daughter of the captain of a British vessel unlucky enough to come into port at this time. She recorded the events in a book called, “A Child...