For fifteen years I lived near Long Road. I never gave it much thought, other than perhaps noting that it is not all that long of a road. About a year ago, while researching another story, I stumbled upon an old photograph of one of Les Long’s airplanes. Curious, I spent more hours than I…
As far as I know, there is only one monument in the Cornelius Methodist Cemetery that was paid for by an act of the United States Congress. On April 19, 1928, Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York introduced H.R. 13172: “That the sum of $1,000 is hereby authorized for the purpose of erecting a…
Growing up in Reedville, Harvey was, of course, a favorite of mine, and recently I decided to spend some time researching him. I started with the Washington County Cultural Resource Inventory Report, created in 1983, but the deeper I dug, the more I found parts of it to be incorrect. The report claimed Harvey was…
Mr. Albert Tozier was proudly a man of Hillsboro, and for 64 consecutive years he carried out a very special task. Beginning in 1872, at age twelve, he rang the bell at the First Methodist Church at the stroke of midnight every New Year’s Eve, announcing the new year to the citizens of Hillsboro. He…
One of my happy diversions is perusing old newspapers. The language and expressions take some getting used to, but once you’re familiar with them, the articles are a real treat. Here’s a synopsis for those who’d rather skip the full article: This comic account describes four Hillsboro men attempting to start a Ford Model T…
Few figures in early Hillsboro left as rich a paper trail as Captain Alvin Montgomery Collins. Between newspaper items on his courthouse gate-building, his home-built inventions, his war record, his family gatherings, and finally his obituary, a genuinely full portrait of the man emerges, one that spans nearly seventy years of Hillsboro history. Early life…
When the first settlers put down roots on the Tualatin Plains, they needed three things before a community could truly call itself a community: a school, a church, and a place to bury their dead. Cornelius got all three in short order. And the stories behind each of them are considerably more remarkable than most…
The Gold Standard — Lester Mooberry on Life in Early Cornelius When it comes to local historians, Lester Mooberry sets the standard. Digging up information on big events is relatively straightforward — newspapers and books documented those well enough. But the details of normal daily life are far more elusive, and those details are what…
The Tualatin River brushes up against the southern edge of Cornelius in no particular hurry. Fifty river miles still lie between it and the Willamette, and the Tualatin seems entirely unbothered by that fact. From the air, its course through the bottomlands south of town looks less like a river and more like a question…
Abigail Scott Duniway is remembered as Oregon’s Mother of Equal Suffrage and “the pioneer Woman Suffragist of the great Northwest.” As lecturer, organizer, writer, and editor, Duniway devoted over forty years to the cause of women’s rights. Duniway toured the northwest to give speeches/lectures advocating for voting rights for women. She would write about her…