![]() The young couple eloped to Vancouver when Anna turned sixteen. Young Mortimer Stump, a hired hand staying on the property, began courting Balch’s oldest daughter, Anna, but Balch denied Mortimer’s request for her hand. The original donation land claim for the area, however, was filed by Danford Balch, who settled here with his large family in 1850. One condition of the donation was that trails be wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs (a section of trail starting from the Lower Macleay Park Trailhead is still wheelchair accessible). Join 10.Donald Macleay, a well-known Portland merchant, donated the current area of Balch Canyon to the City of Portland in 1897 partly, it seems, because he was tired of paying taxes on it but also in commemoration of the 60th year of Queen Victoria’s reign (Macleay was a Scotsman). Balch Creek and Lower Macleay Park now act as a secret, frequent, and favorite entrance to 70 miles of trails in the 8 mile urban forest reserve, one of USA’s largest.Īs usual, I’ve gone on way too far, but to me, the murderously named Balch Creek isn’t just flowing under the Northwest industrial area starting with the slatted structure in today’s image, it’s flowing with history. ![]() This allowed another New York landscape architect named Robert Moses–along with the Portland City Club, Mazamas, Women’s Forum, and others–to promote the creation of Forest Park, officially opened in 1948. Ironically, between property foreclosures and failed missions to monetize these hills, much of it returned to public ownership. Some of those CCC and WPA workers built the little stone restroom, now the oft pondered “Witch’s Castle”. The industrialization of Northwest Portland, when the creek supplies water and and runoff systems to essential economic and war-supporting industries, providing housing and work in an era of depression. Balch Creek’s role in creating Guild Lake and 1905 World Fair, visitors wandering up the creek trail, in their Sunday best and huge floral hats, for views of volcanoes, airships over steamboats, electric trolley bells and the aura of illuminated pavilions. Donald Macleay donating 100+ acres to be a park in 1897, one of Portland’s first, soon followed by the 1903 notion of legendary landscape architect John Olmsted to create Forest Park. In the 1870’s, Reverend Thomas Lamb Eliot began advocating for and creating Portland’s first municipal park commission. In the 1860’s, Balch Creek was added to one of Portland’s first water systems, created by Steven Coffin and Finice Caruthers, who used bored out logs connected like pipes to divert the flow of local creeks to a nearby reservoir.Īnd it just goes on. Imagine getting all this land for free, over 300 acres! Harnessing the creek, raising your family and 9 kids, then shotgunning your new and unwanted son-in-law–the perfectly named Mortimer Stump–in a drunken rage near the crowded Stark Street ferry, only to escape jail, hide in the future Forest Park, before being hunted down by Sheriff James Lappeus, convicted and climactically hung downtown in front of hundreds, the first public execution in the state. Then I think of the Williams, Broughton and Clark, early British and American explorers on special assignments from Captains Vancouver and Lewis, who got just close enough to see today’s MacLeay Park in their telescopes in 17. Imagine the centuries of Multnomah tribes, with powerful chiefs overseeing the lower Columbia, spread out villages with massive potlatch homes, and how the former natural watershed would have been a wild wetland, canoes sliding through swampy channels, hunting and gathering, the creek a resource to drink or bathe. My imagination always starts with the indigenous. Besides the kind of childhood memories and experiences we share as Oregonians–the waterskeeters, the stone house, learning to pick up trash and set lost items by the trailhead–there’s just so much more to ponder from past days in this pocket of Portland.
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