Hood River

Stairs Above the Columbia

The state guide described long flights of weather-beaten stairs climbing the cliffs on First and Eugene Streets, from the business district on the lower terraces of the Columbia River to homes clinging to the sheer wall and resting on the heights above.⁴ The city lies in the Columbia River Gorge about sixty miles east of Portland and had a population of about 8,313 people in 2020.¹ It is the seat of Hood River County, which the city and the surrounding area formed on June 23, 1908, by separating from Wasco County.^1,4

Waucoma, Dog River, and the Coes

When Lewis and Clark arrived in October 1805, tepees of the village of Waucoma, the Place of the Cottonwoods, stood near the confluence of the Columbia and Hood Rivers.⁴ William Clark’s map named the stream Labeasche River after expedition member François Labiche, but that name did not stick and the stream came to be known as Dog River.¹ The Federal Writers’ Project guide says the name came from an early emigrant train that, being delayed, was forced to subsist on dog meat.⁴ In 1852 W. C. Laughlin and Dr. Farnsworth brought herds onto the valley’s grass, but winter storms destroyed their stock and so discouraged the men that they soon left.⁴ Nathaniel and Mary Coe, the first permanent Euro-American settlers, took up a 319.92-acre claim in 1854, and their home served as community center, courthouse, church, and funeral parlor.^2,3 Mary Coe renamed the stream Hood River, and by the guide’s account she refused to accept mail for the community unless it bore that address.^1,4

Rails, Strawberries, and the Big Ditch

The town was platted in 1881 in anticipation of the railroad and grew around its depot, and the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company’s first train arrived in 1882.^1,3 Virgil Winchell, an old settler, often told of a winter when early storms cut the valley off from the outside world and left the settlers without food staples.⁴ As a small boy he found blue jays and owls sheltering in his father’s barn, his father chinked the exits and caught them, and that night the family ate blue jays and owl pie.⁴ With the coming of transportation, sawmills were built in the heavily timbered valley.⁴ A small settlement grew up and formally incorporated in 1895.¹ The state guide names strawberries as the valley’s first cash crop: T. R. Coon, a pioneer teacher, brought Clark Seedling plants into the valley in the eighties, and within a few years it was producing them in car lots.⁴ In 1886 Peter Mohr started the first commercial apple orchard, planting 400 trees on the east side of the valley.⁵ The eleven-mile big ditch, built by Jeremiah F. Davenport’s Valley Improvement Company and finished in 1897, changed the valley ‘almost overnight from a poverty pocket to a land boom,’ David Burkhart and Ruth Guppy wrote in 2007.⁵ Japanese immigrants who came in the early 1900s hired on to clear land as a step toward acquiring property, and orchardists employed them to remove the stumps.^1,5 The first carload of Hood River apples went to New York City in 1900.⁴

The Bank at Third and Oak

The population grew from 622 people in 1900 to about 3000 by 1910.³ The Mt. Hood Railroad reached up the valley to Parkdale in 1910.^2,3 Half of the commercial buildings now standing downtown went up between 1901 and 1914, among them the First National Bank on the northwest corner of Third and Oak streets, completed in September 1910.³ Members of the Stanley-Smith Lumber Co. had founded the bank in 1904, and its upper floor was designed as a meeting hall and offices for the Hood River Commercial Club.³ About 1914 the war in Europe and a lack of strong domestic markets brought depression to the valley.³ In 1932 the Butler Bank closed, and the bank’s National Register nomination calls the First National the only bank that remained open in the Hood River Valley throughout the Depression.³ City Hall, built in 1920 by local contractor L.C. Baldwin and dedicated in February 1921 by Mayor E.L. Scobee, is still used by the city.⁶

Tule Lake, Hanel Lumber, and Sailboards

By 1910 the county counted 468 Japanese and Japanese American residents, and after Executive Order 9066 in 1942 most of Hood River’s Japanese residents were sent to the Tule Lake camp in northern California.^1,7 Masuo Yasui and his brother Renichi Fujimoto had run the Yasui Brothers’ Store for more than thirty years before they were forced to close it permanently.⁸ Those who came back found business signs reading ‘No Japs Wanted,’ in the Oregon Encyclopedia’s account, or ‘No Jap Trade Wanted,’ in the Oregon History Project’s.^1,7 By 1990 the cost of retooling sawmills for smaller logs, the export of unmilled logs, and the listing of the Northern Spotted Owl had squeezed small mills, and Hood River’s Hanel Lumber was among those that sold out or folded.¹ Sailboarders came in the early 1980s for the Gorge winds and the depressed local economy, and by the Oregon Encyclopedia’s count Hood River had over thirty windsurfing equipment suppliers by 1999, more than all the other Gorge towns combined.¹ In 1986 the Port of Hood River remodeled the abandoned Diamond Fruit Cooperative cannery into the Waucoma Center, and the Full Sail Brewing Company works out of the Columbia Building, a cannery facility.^1,9