Portland Homes You Can Buy Built Before 1890

The photos above are of the oldest homes for sale in Portland right now. These homes are all from the 1870s and 1880s. It made me think… what was happening in Portland in the 1880s? I looked online and found this wonderfully interesting website - oregonencyclopedia.

A well-established and prosperous city by the 1870s, Portland experienced a prolonged era of growth with the expansion of the regional railroad system from the 1880s to the 1910s. Completion of a transcontinental link via the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 was important in both symbolic and real terms, but consolidation of the Portland-centered rail network continued for another generation as large and small lines opened the western Oregon mountains and the Columbia Basin interior to logging, ranching, and agriculture. Flour mills, lumber mills, furniture factories, and shipyards lined the Willamette waterfront and major rail corridors, while lumber schooners and grain ships crowded the river.

Booming commerce meant booming neighborhoods. The first three bridges spanned the Willamette River between 1887 and 1891. Entrepreneurs used the bridges to extend electric streetcars (an innovation that dated to 1888) several miles into north, northeast, and southeast Portland. The number of eastside residents in new neighborhoods from Piedmont to Brooklyn passed the number of westside residents in 1906.

Rapid growth also attracted people from different ethnic groups to Portland. In the 1880s, the city’s large Chinese community was second in numbers only to San Francisco’s. The next decades brought immigrants from Japan and from Scandinavian, Eastern European, and Mediterranean countries. At the height of immigration in 1910, the largest contingents of foreign-born Portlanders were from the British Isles, Canada, China, Germany, and Sweden, followed by immigrants from Russia and Italy. Residents in the first decades of the twentieth century could identify South Portland as an Italian and Jewish neighborhood, Brooklyn as Italian, Sabin as German, and Slabtown as Irish and then Croatian. Scandinavians clustered in parts of Northwest and in Albina. Several blocks north of Burnside Street was Japantown, and many from Portland’s small African American community lived near Union Station for ease of access to railroad jobs.