Portland Histories

While the premise of Portland Stories is to tell your personal stories, the premise of Portland Histories is to share what you know, what you've learned, and what you've discovered about Portland's history.

This could be a choice excerpt from a book you're reading on the subject. Or it could be something you've looked into personally -- such as my own research into the illuminated archways which once crisscrossed some downtown intersections. Perhaps you've uncovered some obscure part of your neighborhood's past, or the background of the house you just purchased.

Much like Portland Stories, this site relies entirely upon reader submissions. Moreso than that site, however, Portland Histories will be more heavily curated in an editorial sense.

But you also don't need to submit a history directly to this site to participate in what it seeks to do. If you've posted something about Portland history to your own weblog, let me know and it will be added to a sort of "link blog" which will appear on this site on the main index page, between the first-most and second-most recent entries. This feature is not yet implemented as of site launch.

I want very specifically to extend an invitation to the various people and groups which already work to compile and record neighborhood and oral histories of Portland to submit finished material here. Any such histories will be posted with a link (if any) to the person or group responsible, in order to aide them in recruiting more help for their efforts.

At launch, the web form for submitting histories (much like the one in use at Portland Stories) is not yet ready, so submissions should be sent via email for the time being. Your histories should include both the year (or range of years) of the history, as well as in which current neighborhood it took place. If you want a short "bio" to appear beneath your entry, please include that as well.

If you don't know the latter, take a current street address or intersection for the area in question and run it at Portland Maps. For example, if I search for my apartment building, the results page tells me that it's in Buckman.

Histories posted here will be archived both by the year or years in which they occurred (actually, by decade) and by neighborhood or neighborhoods, as determined by the current list from the Office of Neighborhood Involvement.

To prime the pump, I'll be posting a couple of items which originally appeared on Portland Communique, and on occasion will mine that material further. So if you've been doing some historical research, or recently came across something you'd not heard before, let me know.

The goal of Portland Histories is to bring the past to the present, one post at a time.